Kinky Boots (Mischief Books) (16 page)

She didn’t feel amazing. She felt anything but. Not that it mattered. She couldn’t see that she had any choice under the circumstances. Jill squared her shoulders and ignored the tears. She figured she’d best get used to them. ‘Whether I live or die doesn’t matter so much, Vivie, if it’s not me. Things were amazing with Eleanor, and I miss her, and I miss Finn. But I have to know. I have to be certain that I’m still Jill Hart, and that it’s me, really me that they want.’

Three Months Later

‘Fizz and not tequila shots. I’ll take that as a good sign.’ The voice made Jill’s insides somersault, and the fact that she somehow knew that Finn Masters wasn’t alone, that Eleanor was in residence, made the feeling all the more intense.

‘I’m celebrating.
Full On
is one of the most frequently visited eZines in the UK. The list just came out.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’ve been following it. Its success is mostly due to you, from what I understand. Congratulations.’

He sat down on the stool next to her and ordered a pint. For a second they sat in silence watching the Friday-evening crowd swell the ranks at the Water Poet, almost before their eyes. ‘Is Meinrad minding the shop tonight?’ she asked, hoping that light and airy conversation would disguise the nerves that bubbled to the surface with Finn and Eleanor so close to her after all these weeks, after all of the agony of trying to get used to being without them.

‘Chelsea,’ he said. ‘Meinrad’s off tying up a woman over in Camden Town.’

‘And you? You and Eleanor?’

When the bartender brought Finn’s pint, he also brought Jill another glass of fizz, and Finn offered her a warm smile. ‘We came to help you celebrate. Vivie told us.’

Jill still couldn’t imagine how Finn had convinced her friend that none of them were insane. She wasn’t sure she could have pulled it off. Ultimately she had been glad to have a friend whose shoulder she could cry on, and she cried on Vivie’s shoulder a lot in those early days, a friend who understood exactly the circumstances of her anguish. She reckoned that Vivie was Finn and Eleanor and Sole Alliance’s way of having an insider, one whom Jill wouldn’t chase away, one who could make sure Jill didn’t try to hang herself or jump into the Thames with a breeze-block tied around her neck.

In addition to Vivie’s eagle eye, Jill knew that Sole Alliance were keeping watch over her. She never actually saw them, except for the occasional glimpse of someone tall and big as a mountain disappearing around a corner, or a wild mass of dreadlocks that vanished in a crowded Shoreditch street before she got a good look. But what was most reassuring, as well as disconcerting, was the smell. Occasionally, always when she least expected it, always when she most needed it, the scent of Finn that she knew so well would fill the air, so powerfully and so close to her that she expected to turn and find him standing there. He never was. Some sort of Sole Alliance magic, or maybe some demon voodoo that Eleanor conjured up.

She wanted to be angry about the close watch she was sure they kept on her. She wanted to call it stalking. She wanted someone of flesh and blood that she could tell to fuck off. But there was no one, and in truth she found it comforting to think they were keeping an eye on her. She found in it some wild sense of hope that she couldn’t fully allow herself and yet couldn’t fully deny herself either. And anyway, it could have just as easily been her imagination.

She returned her attention to the sea-water eyes of Finn Masters looking down at her and, with a sudden tightening of her throat, she realised just how much she’d missed them. She smiled up at him. ‘Have you come to celebrate me still being alive?’

The smile slipped from his face, but he held her gaze and gave her a slow nod of confirmation. ‘Something like that, I suppose.’

She lifted the new champagne flute in a toast. ‘I celebrate that every day, Finn. Cheers.’ They both drank.

For a long moment they sat next to each other in silence, but it was strangely comfortable silence considering all that had passed between them.

‘How’s Eleanor?’ Jill finally asked, when she’d got the courage.

‘I’m fine, Jill.’ Hearing Eleanor’s voice from Finn’s lips was a little disconcerting, but it was Eleanor nonetheless. She knew it was. ‘I miss you.’

Jill blinked hard, and the room seemed suddenly misty. ‘I miss you too.’ The words weren’t as strong as she’d intended. They wavered at the back of her throat before they found their way out.

In an act that could have been either brave or stupid, Finn reached out and laid his hand over hers. ‘I miss you too, Jill.’ His fingers tightened. ‘Every second of every day, I miss you.’

Jill bit her lip and swallowed back more emotion than she was ready to give up just yet. But almost as though they had a mind of their own, her fingers curled around his. ‘I had to know,’ she said. ‘I had to know that I could survive without her, that my life didn’t depend on her. Or you.’

‘I know that.’ Finn said. ‘I understand that. I always understood that.’ He squeezed her fingers until she feared he’d break them, and yet she held on. ‘But letting you go, giving you the space you needed, was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. The hardest thing either of us has ever done.’

She nodded, afraid to speak, not wanting to blubber in such a public place.

Before she could respond, he continued. ‘You have to know that giving you space didn’t mean I was letting you go, not really letting you go. It never meant that. I have every intention of elbowing my way back into your life. I’ve just been waiting for the right moment.’

Her insides leapt at his words, almost as though Eleanor were there inside her again, excited, happy, anticipating. She gave a little laugh. ‘Now that you know I’m not going to die.’

He took both of her hands and pulled her off the stool to her feet. ‘I would have never let you die, Jill. Surely you know that.’ Before she could reply he kissed her. It was quick and awkward and yet she felt Eleanor’s excitement mixed with her own, mixed with the dance of nervous hope they all three felt just below the surface in the space that wasn’t exactly flesh, the space that was just the right size for a demon.

When he pulled away, she looked down at the mauve boots she wore almost every day. ‘I still haven’t paid for these, you know.’

He followed her gaze. ‘The accumulation of interest alone is staggering.’ The corner of his mouth twitched with a repressed smile.

‘I always try to pay my debts,’ she said.

‘It’s a big one, and long overdue.’ This time he pulled her to stand between his legs where even in the fading light she could see he was hard. They weren’t alone in the kiss he pulled her into. It was long and lingering and Eleanor was once again installed comfortably in the space between, the space that still joined them, still felt like it could be filled by no one else but them.

He pulled away breathless. ‘Let’s get out of here. I want to be alone with you.’ He held her gaze. ‘Just the three of us.’

This time they made the walk back to Kinky Boots with no groping. This time they walked hand in hand in a space that was filled with tightly controlled anticipation. Jill felt Eleanor’s presence as surely as if she once again resided in that mysterious place at her centre, and yet she felt her equally wrapped around Finn, more closely than his own skin.

Once they were inside his flat, inside his room, he unzipped her dress. It was slate blue with mauve pinstripes, sleek and sexy, fitted to the curves of her, curves he ran his hands down over before grabbing the hem of the dress and tugging it off over her uplifted arms.

He caught his breath at the sight of her, silver-grey suspenders grasping the tops of sheer stockings, a bra of matching lace barely covering the jut of her anxious nipples. ‘It wasn’t you,’ she said to Eleanor. ‘It wasn’t you making me anything I wasn’t already. It was just you giving me the courage to trust myself.’

‘It’s taken you long enough to figure that out,’ Finn said. She could tell Eleanor echoed his sentiments. ‘All you had to do was ask us. We would have told you.’

When Finn reached to undo her bra, she stopped his hands. ‘Tie me up,’ she whispered. She brushed a kiss across his stubbled jaw and guided his hands to her breasts. ‘I want you to tie me up.’

He led her to the bed, eyes locked on hers as though he were waiting for her to change her mind. When she didn’t, he laid her down on the mattress and straddled her so that, where she rested her head on the pillows, the bulge inside his jeans was tantalisingly close to her hungry mouth. With a move that was nothing less than sleight-of-hand, he unhooked her bra and slid it away, dropping a warm kiss on each nipple as he did so. That done, he raised a finger to his lips silencing her. ‘Don’t speak,’ he said. ‘Just feel. Just let it happen.’ Then he rose once again above her, crossed her hands at the wrist, bound them with her bra and secured them to the brass headboard as high as her arms would stretch.

When he was certain the knot was secure, he lingered to kiss her, and she swallowed his breath, wild, excited, chaotic breath that tasted of him, tasted of lust, tasted of Eleanor. When he pulled away, he rose, still straddling her, unbuttoned his shirt and slid it off, revealing the naked rise and fall of his chest, the hard plane of his belly sloping to his navel and to the low ride of his jeans; revealing the long solid muscles of his biceps, the blue-green pathways of the veins running along his forearms beneath smooth skin. And she wanted him like she’d never wanted anything.

Holding her gaze, he lowered a kiss onto her navel. Then he made quick work of her knickers, shimmying them down over her bottom and off, leaving her sex bare and begging, peeking from beneath the lace of the suspenders. As she shifted to get his hand closer to where she needed it, he placed a flat palm against her pubic bone and pressed her back onto the mattress, pausing for a single torturous rake of his thumb against her swelling clit. And she whimpered. But he gave her a warning glance and a finger raised to his lips.

Once she had calmed, once she lay still again, he released a stocking from its suspender and rolled it down over her thigh, down over her calf, down over her ankle, kissing and nibbling as he went. Only the fact that her hands were tied and that he secured the leg he wasn’t undressing between his own legs kept her from writhing and squirming with the delight of it, with the nasty pleasure of knowing that each time he bent to kiss her leg, he could easily glance up to admire the view between her legs, slick with the want of him.

Once the stocking was removed, he tied her ankle securely to the brass of the footboard. Then he repeated the act, securing her other leg so that she was splayed open as wide as the footboard would allow.

She was certain he had stretched her out so that she couldn’t move, and yet, when he slid out of his jeans and returned to the bed, his erection leading the way, she could see that he had given her just enough moving space for what he had in mind. Then, with one last sleight-of-hand, he removed the suspenders and dropped them to the side of the bed.

She braced herself for his mounting, but instead, he knelt between her legs, one hand resting on his penis, the other moving over her body, caressing her belly, her breasts, the ticklish undersides of her arms. Then he wriggled two fingers up between her the swell of her, into the slick slip and slide of her tight sex, and she gripped them hungrily. His eyelids fluttered at the feel of her, and his breath caught.

‘You’re bound to me, Jill, bound to Eleanor and me, and I want it that way. I’ve wanted it that way from the beginning.’ He gave a little push with his fingers and she whimpered and jerked involuntarily against her bonds.

Then he leaned low between her legs, holding her open with two fingers, and kissed her opening, mouth wide. His tongue probed and sank deep, his bottom teeth raked as though he would swallow her whole, until his mouth converged and contracted with a tight hard nip and suckle around the erection of her clit. And she convulsed and writhed against his face, grinding her bottom into the mattress, then shifting upwards to get closer.

Breathing like a windstorm, he rose, his face glistening from her, and pushed and manoeuvred until his penis was up tight against her. Then, catching his breath, he spoke. ‘You should know that I’m as bound to you as you are to me, that there’s no part of me, no part of us, that isn’t yours to control, and it’s been that way from the beginning.’ Then he thrust in hard, and the cry from her throat was raw and desperate and needy in her frustrated efforts to get closer to him.

‘Hold still,’ he gasped. ‘This is mine to give. All mine this time.’

His control was torturous as he pushed all the way in, then pulled all the way back out, leaving her raw and empty, then pushed all the way back in again.

‘Shall I unbind you?’ His voice was tight, controlled.

She shook her head wildly. ‘No. Don’t ever unbind me, Finn. Ever.’

She was sure his eyes were misted with emotion as he took her mouth in a kiss that tasted of her. ‘Then we’ll come together,’ he said. ‘All bound together, like we were meant to be.’

She nodded and whimpered, and thrashed against him.

He rose on his knees, cupped her bottom and manoeuvred until he was deep in her pussy, and when he could go no deeper he thrust. He thrust relentlessly. She took him into herself, gripping and grasping and growling, and Eleanor was there in that place in between. She could almost see the knots being tied, she could almost feel the bonding. Right over left and under and through. Left over right and under and through.

They were both too far gone to do anything but hold tight and thrust. His erection seemed to have drilled a hole to her very centre, and she felt as though she could take him into her, take him whole, body and soul. And as they roared their way into orgasm, Eleanor wrapped herself around them, and they all rode the wave of pleasure together.

* * *

Later, when they were lying in each other’s arms and Eleanor was curled around both of them, filling all the space in between, Jill asked: ‘Eleanor, can she come back to me?’

Finn pulled her still closer and kissed the top of her head. ‘If you want her to. But only if you want.’