Bound, Spanked and Loved: Fourteen Kinky Valentine's Day Stories (69 page)

“Come on, stop being angry,” he crooned at her, then kissed her cheek. “We’re not going to enjoy ourselves here, either. I promise.”

“You promised to show me the known universe,” she continued to pout. At this point, she hoped to make him feel guilty, although she knew from experience he was extremely difficult to manipulate. Especially in comparison to Dax and Tick. “You promised me the time of my life.”

“I did, and I will,” he assured, his tone not very apologetic. “Just not today.” He began to kiss down her neck as he pulled her tightly to him, one of his favorite beginnings to their favorite activity together, but this time she turned her head away.

“I bet Dax or Tick would let me come,” she continued.

He frowned, probably now beginning to realize that there would be no morning delights when she was feeling pouty. He sighed. “You can take it up with them. I guarantee you that they’re going to give you the same answer that I did: not this planet. We’ll be at a better one in about four, five days. Just be patient.”

Patience wasn’t one of Chloe’s virtues. She pressed the blankets over her chest as she watched Malo sit up on the side of the bed, stretch, and then reach down to put his pants on. “If you’re a good girl, I’ll make sure to get you something nice.”

She glared at him and inwardly growled.

He seemed to know he’d said something annoying as he looked over his shoulder and grimaced. “I didn’t mean that to sound condescending. Just trust my experience, sweetheart.”

She rolled her eyes. This wasn’t going to be the end of this.

*****

T
wo hours later...

“And then he said, ‘Just trust my experience,
sweetheart
,’” Chloe groused, now to Tick since Dax hadn’t shown himself to be particularly sympathetic to her being put on house arrest for the day.

Tick grunted as he worked underneath an engine. “You
should
trust his experience,” he told her, much to her displeasure. “Honey, if Mal says it’s bad, then it’s probably pretty bad. You haven’t been out here as long as we have. We’ve seen some pretty messed-up cultures so far.”

“I’d be perfectly safe if I was with you guys,” she complained.

“I appreciate that vote of confidence. But we’re on a diplomatic mission and we don’t want to have to throw our weight around and possibly kill men who want to mess with you. It might prove to be counterproductive to the meeting that Dax and Malo are scheduled for. You’ll be perfectly safe here on the ship.”

“Is she bothering you?” Dax asked, stepping into the room as he was putting on a vest that looked like it was the holster for about fifteen separate weapons, including several blaster-like weapons and something that looked a lot like a grenade. “I told her not to come right in here and start hassling you when Malo and I already said no.”

“Do I have to remind you it’s Valentine’s Day? I was hoping you were gonna do something special, not leave me on a crummy old spaceship,” she continued to pout.

“Hey,” Tick said, pulling himself out from underneath the engine and rubbing grease off of his hands. “It’s not crummy. Be nice.” He threw the towel down and then sauntered up to her like a tomcat. “And never you fret, baby. When we come home, we’ll sit down for a nice dinner, watch a movie, get you to come a little...” He wrapped his arms around her. “What could be better?” He kissed her cheek then gave her a slap on the ass when he detached himself from her. “Don’t touch anything on the ship while we’re gone. Stay out of this room, the control room, my room, the boiler room...” He stopped talking and looked at her thoughtfully. “On second thought, it might be better if you just stay in your apartment...”

She looked at Dax and gave him a tightlipped glance that she hoped would garner some sympathy. Dax gave her a grin and then walked up, tilted down, and pushed her over his shoulder so that he was once again carrying her around like a leg of beef. She made an ‘oof’ sound and then said, “Really, Dax—put me down. I’m in no mood to get carried around like I’m a toy poodle or something!”

She realized that he was toting her back to her apartment. “Let me help you get situated, and then we’re gonna get going. The sooner we get that meeting over with, the sooner we’ll get back. I’m not sure when we’ll get back, but we’ll be hungry, so keep dinner warm for us?”

“Yeah, this seems fair,” she muttered sarcastically. “You go off and have fun outside the ship, and I’m stuck working in here.”

“You love cooking,” he reminded, beginning to sound exasperated.

“Yeah, but...” She felt a firm slap against her ass and gritted her teeth. That one actually
hurt
! “Dax!” she cried, trying to squirm and roll off his shoulder but he held her tight.

“There’s more where that came from,” he threatened. “You need to stop pouting. You’re acting childish and sullen,” Dax informed her, sounding more than a little put out with her. “We aren’t keeping you here because we want to make you angry or ignore you. We would love to have you with us, always. But we’re acting in your own best interest.”

“I think I can act in my own best interest,” she seethed.

“No, you can’t. You just want to be off the ship for a while. I get that. You’re not used to being cooped up. But you’re gonna have to learn to deal with it for a few more days until we get to the next planet.”

Malo was in her apartment, waiting for her, when they came into the room. He was giving her a weary look when Dax put her down. “Don’t tell me you’re gonna give in,” Dax groaned, and Chloe’s spirits leapt.

He snorted. “No, of course not.” He held up a bracelet and presented it to her. “A gift. It’s a communicator.” He showed her a tiny button on the side of it and said, “Click that if you want to contact one of us, and click the one on the other side to take a call. This is connected to all three of us. If something happens to us—and this isn’t going to happen but let’s just say it does and we don’t come back—then I want you to sit here until the next authority unit comes to this planet next week. They know about you and will assume responsibility for your safety. Go downstairs and hide in the panic room until they come.”

“You’re all paranoid,” she said as she watched him attach the communicator onto her wrist.

“Well, it’s hard for us to work when we’re busy worrying about you,” he replied.

“I cannot be more serious when I say that you are not to even put a toe outside. Do not even open the hatch door to leave. I cannot be any clearer on that,” Dax told her in low tones. “I know you’re not happy, but I guarantee you this is not a time to go do whatever it is you want, anyway.”

“Look, I’m not a child, okay?” she huffed. “I understand. It’s dangerous, and I should restrain myself and sit here and do women’s work while the big strong men go forth into the wilds,” she said as sarcastically as she possibly could.

She wasn’t sure they grasped her sarcasm, because they looked calmer afterwards.

Worst Valentine’s Day ever: stuck on a stupid planet full of stupid people and kept on the ship by her stupid boyfriends. It was less fun than the weeks before it and probably the weeks after. Apparently, they hadn’t listened to her clues about how she wanted to be treated well on this day for once.

Tick finally came in, no longer covered in grease and now wearing huge black goggles. “Ready to go?” he asked the other two men. “The sooner we get there, the sooner we can get back to our girl.” He winked at her, and she smirked back at him. He was so cheesy that she had eventually decided that it was adorable.

“What’s with the goggles?” she asked, tilting her head to the side.

“It’s dusty as hell out there, that’s why. I refuse to go through the day picking sand out of my eye,” he told her, walking to the door and changing the scenery so that it showed the outside. It looked like a planet Luke Skywalker would call home. It was sand as far as the eye could see, as well as lots of men dressed in black garb and hoods and full face masks. She walked to the side of the wall and looked out, feasting her eyes on the two planets that were visible in the sky overhead and the colorful marketplace just across the street.

He came back and folded his arms around her body. “Love you,” he told her, and not for the first time. He had been talking about his love for her since the morning after they’d first had sex. He leaned down to kiss her, then nipped her bottom lip playfully. “Sexiest girl in the universe,” he cooed at her.

“Alright, enough of that,” Dax said, a layer of jealousy in his tone as he put an arm between them to push Tick back. “We’re running late as it is.” He turned and pointed at Chloe. “Stay,” he ordered, and she wondered if he knew that he’d just ordered her around like a dog and was trying to be funny in his own way, or if he didn’t know and that sort of order just came naturally to him.

“Be good,” Malo told her once more as he turned toward the door.

She followed them all the way to the ship’s smallest hatchway exit. Tick easily opened up the exterior door in a way similar to how he opened the door to his apartment, with a swipe of his finger. Some sand poured in immediately from outside, but so did a mouthwatering aroma of fresh-baked breads.

When they left, she studied the door for a long moment and then finally sauntered back to her apartment, where she could at least watch the people walking around right below the ship. Apparently this was not a planet that was a stranger to interplanetary travel, because they seemed to be parked right in the middle of a city.

She sighed and then eventually turned away and began preparing dinner. She still used her old ovens from her apartment, which she now realized Tick had greatly refitted to work on a spaceship, but now she was used to using very exotic flours, flavors, sauces, and spices. The pastry chef in her was definitely begging for her to go outside and try to haggle for some special flour, or at least a loaf of bread so she could compare the flavors of this planet to what she was used to and maybe even try to duplicate what she’d found out there.

When she had most of the prep work for dinner completed, she went back out toward ‘the window’ and investigated. It didn’t
look
dangerous. She hadn’t seen any sort of violence yet, and she’d seen women out there, despite the fact that she was warned they didn’t treat women well. At least
they
allowed their women to go outside.

She found herself walking back out toward the exit. Honestly, she told herself, she was a free woman who, until she was brought on this spaceship against her will, was single and independent with just as many rights as anyone else. Hell, she’d owned her own business, which was no small feat for someone just out of college at the time.

So if she wanted to just go outside and look around the market, haggle for some bread, and come back, then she was going to do it, and then she was going to give them a hard time for being such dicks about it. After all, it was going to be a long, hard road with those guys if they kept locking her in the spaceship
just because
. It wasn’t even as if they had been to the planet themselves. They were just going off hearsay. Back home, people had told her that living and walking around Paris by herself was dangerous, yet she had done it literally every day for years, and she hadn’t had anything horrible happen to her.

With those thoughts in mind, she meandered down to the small hatchway and played with the door’s panel until she managed to open it. More sand blew in, and at this point she figured that it was all or nothing. She donned her sunglasses, pulled a scarf up around her head, and then walked out into the light.

*****

I
t took about a whole half an hour before she really regretted her decision to leave the ship. Until then, she was having the time of her life. She had, indeed, made an easy trade for bread at the first place she’d seen it being sold. She even traded her sunglasses for a bag of a new flour and felt quite happy about it. It was when she was coming back that she realized that the door had been locked behind her, and now she had no way to get on the ship without one of the guys. To make matters worse, her hanging around the hatchway was clearly making the local men very suspicious.

So far, she had been fine not speaking the planet’s language. She didn’t have the implant that the guys had, so she was forced to play charades for everything she wanted, and that had been going quite well. When a native man came up to her, hassled her, and then eventually made a grab for her, she didn’t quite know what to do. She had no idea what he was talking about, and she had no way to communicate what she was doing.

When her communicator rang, she couldn’t answer it before the thickly robed middle-aged man in front of her grabbed her wrist, pulled the communicator off, and then jerked it around in her face as if to ask where she’d gotten it.

After that, it got bad pretty fast. She tried to turn and walk in the other direction, but she was followed, grabbed, and then held not just by the one man, but by the other two younger men near him, until she was placed in a vehicle that looked like an open-topped tank and found herself sitting between two goats.

Her neck was examined by the men, and then her arms, and then her stomach. After they had chattered back and forth to each other, they all seemed very satisfied with their decision to transfer her somewhere. This was around the time when she lost it, tried to fight her way free, and had to be physically held down while she was transported halfway across the sand-colored city.

It was the longest hour of her life, and the entire hour was comprised of her thinking on how stupid she’d been and how she wanted nothing more than to stick her ass back in her spaceship apartment and just stay there for the rest of forever.

Luckily, the hour ended with another group approaching them in a similar vehicle. This vehicle had Dax, Malo, and Tick on it and none of them looked like they were being held against their will. The guys, and their escorts, began talking to her capturers so fast that the language sounded like one endless stream of babbling. Eventually, she was let out of the car. As soon as she was on her feet, she ran right into the arms of Dax, who was closest, and who held her tight against his chest. Malo, after asking if she was hurt and finding out she wasn’t, proceeded to get her communicator back as well.