Captivated (Stranded) (4 page)

His firm, smooth lips. “Where will you sleep?
‘On you.’ Say, ‘On you.’

He tipped his head toward the closet. “In there.”

“On what?”

“The floor.”

“No, you can’t. This wasn’t your fault.”

“First of all, it kind of was.” He gave her a pointed look. “If I’d just said hi to you at some point, Magda probably wouldn’t have locked you in.” He rolled his eyes. “Maybe. Anyway, I’m used to sleeping on the ground. I sleep on the floor half the time as it is.”

“Oh.”

“So don’t sweat it.”

“I’ll try not to,” she said, then without thinking, “I hate sweaty sheets.”

He laughed. “Jesus,” he said, and carried his plate to the sink. “Just keep it down out here. I need my beauty sleep.”

Chapter 4

The aroma of coffee, rich and velvety in her nose.

Then, another set of scents. Laundry soap and cotton. Under that, from the pillow itself, something more redolent of skin and hair. She rolled her head, pushing her face into it, inhaling deep, seeking more. In her drowsy state, she snorted.

A soft laugh. “Sleep all right?”

Evan sat at the table, a steaming mug between his hands. She pushed up to sitting, smoothing hair that probably looked like wolverines had rutted in it. “Yes. Thanks again. You didn’t have to give up your bed.”

She had tried once more last night to take the floor herself, but he’d ignored her and changed the sheets anyway, taking the used ones with him. Because
I hate sweaty sheets.

He probably couldn’t wait to get rid of her.

“Were you comfortable?” she asked.
On the floor in the sheets I didn’t want, after you made me dinner and suffered my break-up story?

“It was fine,” he said. “Always is. Want some eggs?”

She didn’t usually eat more than cereal or, in the winter, oatmeal, but was done looking like a
prima donna
. Plus, saying yes set Evan into motion at the stove, and that turned out to be a great way to begin her day. Pouring herself a mug of coffee, she sat at the table, content to watch him perform these simple, unglamorous tasks. Breaking eggs, grinding pepper, toasting bread. He wore his work uniform again, and she wondered if he wore it every day, or just because she was here. She suspected he wore the shirt to cover his arms, and that made her want to rip it off him.

That and the tantalizing hints of triceps and trapezius flexing underneath.

And, damn, his ass. She let her gaze follow the inner seam of one leg up and up, to where it must snug right up to his—

“Captivity narratives, right?”

She choked on her coffee. “Yes.”

He turned, spatula in hand, subtly checking the tabletop for coffee spew. “So you’ve seen the Platypus Queen book?”

“Uh, no. I’d remember that.”

“I’ll show you after breakfast.”

When they had eaten and washed up, him at the kitchen sink and her in the second-floor gallery restroom with a dollop of his toothpaste on her fingertip, he led her to the basement archive that felt like a second home. He didn’t turn on the fluorescent lights, depending instead on the morning sunlight that filtered through the high windows. It left the archive with plenty of shadows, and she wondered how much of his life here he spent in the dark.

He walked down an aisle, scanning the book spines. He handed it to her with a straight face. Barely.

“
Bill Me Later: My Years As Nightly Sex Hostage to the Queen of Platypus Island
.” Laine looked up at him, a grin spreading across her face.

“It’s something else.”

“Fictional, surely.”

“No idea. Didn’t care, frankly.”

Something occurred to her then, and she couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought to ask it before now. “Have you read many of the books?”

“Most of them.” At her surprised look, he shrugged. “The ones in English. The others I skimmed.”

Her grin widened. “For illustrations.”

“What? I’m twenty-seven, and I live in a sex museum.” He placed a hand casually on a shelf. “I was curious.”

“Anything good?”

“Depends on your taste, I guess.” He nodded at the book in her hands. “Anyway, I figured that might fit with your research.”

“Thanks.”

“Sure. I’m cleaning the floors today. There’s a break area in the front office. I’ll put some of the rice in the fridge there, so you can eat lunch when you want.”

She felt a pang of disappointment that he hadn’t invited her to eat with him. But he was probably just trying to stay out of her way. “Thanks so much, Evan.”

His head dipped away at his name. “Yup. Have fun with that.” He turned to go, then stopped and pivoted back, hands up. “I mean, not fun, but…you know.”

“Sure you don’t want to stay and read it with me?” she teased.

He let out a laugh that sounded half regretful and half…what? “I got floors to mop.”

Not a yes. Not a no, either, but she decided to give him a break. “Oh all right. I’ll just have to share my impressions at dinner.”

“Right.” He pointed over his shoulder. “I’m…going now.” And he hustled out of the aisle.

Laine set herself up at her usual desk, setting her notebook beside the book. She imagined Evan perusing the shelves, and wondered what made him pull out any given book.
Depends on your taste,
he had said. What was Evan’s taste? This book had made an impression, but probably just for its ridiculous premise.

Two hours later, she was no closer to pinning down Evan’s kinks than she had been before she opened the book, but she nurtured a growing hope that he had found this book arousing and not just sensational. Because the thing nailed
her
kinks—every damn one of them from being blindfolded to fucking a stranger to getting tickled. It even had sleep denial, with the female captor keeping the hero awake by alternately licking, sucking, and biting his scrotum.

Another hour on, she was so restless she could no longer hold her pen to take notes. Marking her place in the book, she rose from her chair and headed for the restroom.

She didn’t bother going into a stall. Instead, she lay on the floor (it was clean, right? Evan kept it clean.
God.
) and hiked up her skirt. Shoving her hands into her panties, she gasped at the first contact of her fingers, chilled by the cool air of the basement, against her hot, slick skin. Keeping her touch light but relentless, she circled her clit, stroked up through her pussy, and imagined Evan’s tongue doing all of it. She wished she had two more hands so she could brace them on her thighs and push them apart. Fuck, what she wouldn’t give to feel his hands doing that. She had to content herself with the image of the top of his head with its almost-curling hair, his nose mashing into her mound, his stubble scraping her inner thigh.

She sighed loudly, then imagined him humming against her flesh in return, and she was too close to the edge to hold off any longer. She cried out, some unintelligible sound that would have been a curse if she’d been able to form a word.

She lay staring at the tiled ceiling for a long time, her pulse ticking in her fingertips.

*

Near lunchtime, Evan made up a dish of dinner leftovers and carried it down to the break area, half hoping to meet Laine there (okay, more than half). He didn’t and had just put the bowl in the refrigerator when he pulled it back out and left the office before he could talk himself out of it.

She wasn’t at her desk, but he could smell her orange-blossom scent as if she had just walked past him. His dick jumped, seeming to seek the scent along with his nose. The book lay open to a passage he remembered well, the one where the guy was forced to go down on the crazy queen holding him captive. He supposed that could happen, but Evan didn’t believe for a second that this guy had been forced to do anything, not the way he described his obvious relish at diving into her cunt. The whole thing reeked of an overblown letter to
Penthouse
, but a really long one, and a hot one, and one that had occupied Evan for two solid months when he found it.

Setting Laine’s lunch on the desk, he stepped toward the shelves to see if she was there. “Hello?” he said softly, intimidated by the quiet of the space. No response, but he heard something else, a sound that yanked at his dick again, and he was helpless to do anything but follow it to the restroom door.

He stood stock still for a moment, holding his breath, before he heard her voice, low and feminine. With his dick screaming at him, he put his ear to the door.

She was panting, and when she wasn’t panting she was moaning, and then she was cursing (maybe; it got garbled) and he was dying to open the door to see exactly what made her make those sounds, punctuated by
yes
and
yes
and
God yes
. Then she let out a cry that might have been
fuck
or might have been
fuck me
, but the last thing she sighed was definitely
please
.

He took the stairs two at a time, pushing through doors until he stood, chest heaving, in his closet. Shoving a box against the door with his boot, he yanked at his belt to free it from its buckle. Below it, his cock strained against his pants, and if he didn’t get them off soon, he’d have a stain he didn’t want to explain at dinner. A mindless jerk downward opened his zipper and then his pants and boxers lay around his ankles. Backing against the wall, he looked up at the collage.

It wasn’t finished, but it was enough. He let his gaze go out of focus and her features came out. Her hair, a variegated light brown that reminded him of a well-handled cedar plank. Her profile with its delicate curves of nose and throat converging at plush lips. He spit on his hand and swirled his palm around his cockhead, catching his breath at the thought of those lips pouting into a wet kiss that coated his head with her saliva and his precum.

He staggered and spit again, and then gripped his dick and began to stroke it roughly. He pushed past the sharp ache of his cock swelling against its grafts. He tried not to think about what he was doing, about how she didn’t deserve to get shoved into fantasies like this, that she was too good to kneel at his feet and suck his cock, but God. So much for that. He closed his eyes on the collage and imagined her down there, looking up at him as his dick slid in and out of her willing mouth, her teeth scraping the rim of his head on every pull, her tongue tracing the seams of his scars. He imagined driving his hands into her hair, feeling it between his fingers, the shape of her skull against his fingertips. The sounds she might make (sounds he’d already heard her make, to be fair). The feel of her hands squeezing the base of his dick, of her fingers pulling on his balls and then pressing up against his taint. Sliding wetly back until they found his asshole.

Fuck.

He widened his stance, trying to do all of that with his own fingers. In his mind’s eye, Laine looked up at him and winked before she pushed a finger into his ass. Then she pulled her mouth off of him and said, “Come for me, Evan.”

He did, with a strangled grunt, beating furiously at his dick, pumping a finger into himself. Something hard hit his kneecaps—one, two—but his balls were so tight with pleasure, his head so full of her scent and her mouth and her command, he didn’t realize at first that his legs had collapsed under him. When he finally opened his eyes, he stared without comprehension. Thick, white cum spattered the floor in front of his knees. His pants bound his ankles under him. One hand still gripped his dick, the other…. He tugged on it and got a residual jolt as his finger slid free of his asshole. He heaved a breath and tipped his head back to look at the collage.

It occupied a good portion of the wall between the storage shelves and the high ceiling. Sunlight through the high little windows lit the space with bright insistence, sharpening the torn edges of each piece of paper, and for a moment he could imagine the thing before him was a random collage, with no purpose other than to cover a wall. But his brain didn’t let him get away with that shit for long.
No, freak,
it said,
it’s her and you made it and this isn’t the first time you’ve jacked off to it.

He let his chin fall to his chest, unable to look at the image any more, yet unwilling to rise and destroy it.

He knew he should.

He knew, with a certainty borne only partly of the door’s lack of a lock, that she could discover it at any moment.

But if she didn’t…

If she didn’t, he’d have it for all those nights after she left.

How hard could it be to keep her out of here? It was only a closet, after all. A closet with undeniable proof of his fucked up obsession, but a closet still. He just had to keep her distracted.

Maybe that book would do the trick. And there were plenty more after that one.

A whole library full of them, and him their keeper.

Chapter 5

Evan was cleaning the break area in the office when she found him at the end of the day.

“You’re right,” she said. “That book is something else.”

Her voice, back to its normal, everyday range now, still got under his skin. “Ohio knows best.”

“Hmph.” She moved to the sink and began to wash her bowl. “Thanks for bringing my lunch down. Sorry I missed you.”

He looked up from the toaster oven, but she kept her eyes on her bowl. Was that a blush on her neck? Nervous, Iowa? Somehow, seeing the tables turned on her was…not gratifying, exactly. It actually made him feel closer to her. “No worries. I just dropped it off. Had to get back upstairs to buff the floors.” Sort of true.

Yes, it
was
a blush, and now it had company: a sag of relief across her shoulders. So she
had
wondered all afternoon if he’d heard her.

Had that thought excited her, even a little?

“That’s the cleanest toaster oven I’ve ever seen.”

He finished wiping down the glass door and swept the crumbs from the counter into a trash can. “That’s my job.”

She scanned the office. “In fact,” she said, “this whole place is extremely clean. Like you’ve scared the dirt away.”