Roxy Harte (15 page)

“Do you want my kisses, Kitten?” he teases.

“Yes,” I growl softly. Lifting my chin to kiss me, he tugs my hair to hold me in place.

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“Did you miss me?”

“Yes,” I hiss and I realize that it is truth. I did miss Garrett and now, I am his again. I close my eyes, not wanting to cry for Lord Fyre any more, wanting to move on, wanting to not hurt so desperately with the gaping hole in my heart.
Dear God, please let Garrett be up to mending this. How can I want
Garrett so badly in this breath and miss Lord Fyre so desperately in both the one before and the
one after?

“Did you find your darkness, Kitten?” he asks, moving his lips teasingly, minutely closer to mine.

Opening my eyes to meet his gaze, I don’t answer, I can’t answer, and yes, I will refuse to share with this man what I shared with the other, because that is too private. I want to tell him that my darkness is none of his damn business, but how fair would that be? Someday, maybe I’ll share with Garrett…maybe when I’m stronger, but not now, not with Lord Fyre’s touch so recent. Pushing my mouth to his, our lips barely touch before he tugs me away by my hair, reestablishing the agonizing distance between our mouths. I cry out, “Oh God,” and it isn’t because he’s hurting me. Lightning shoots through my pussy and I come, just a jolt, but an orgasm nonetheless.

“Who is your Master, Kitten?”

My lips part to answer, I want to say you are, but the words get caught in my throat and I am stuck opening and closing my mouth like a goldfish.
You are, you are, you are
, my mind screams but the words won’t come out and I don’t know why the words won’t come out. Lord Fyre is gone.
Gone!

My face sags forward, but Garrett holds my head in place with a firm grip in my hair, shaking my head with the strength in his hand. He regains my gaze. “When you are able to call me Master, when you are able to say that you belong to me, then Kitten, and only then, are you allowed to kiss me. Understand?”

“Yes,” I whisper and I realize more than my face is sagging in shame and exhaustion. My heart sags, my heart is exhausted, and as much as I want to reach out to him and ask him to fix me…it isn’t his job. Only time can fix this. Only time…

“Can you stand?” he asks.

I shrug, answering impatiently, “Put me down.”

He lowers me to the tile floor of the shower. I press my back against the cool tile wall behind me, needing the support, not realizing how badly I was shaking before I stood. I berate myself for not calling him Master, it’s just a
word
, though I don’t even try to convince myself of the truth of that particular lie. I know that someday I will be ready to call him Master again, but not today.

I wonder where Lord Fyre is at this exact moment. Mind or gut answers that he is on a plane…on a plane to join his wife. I wonder why that fact doesn’t mean anything to me? I should be on my knees praying—praying hard.
I am so going to hell.

Garrett dunks his head under the spray then throws his head back, flinging water off his head. Reaching for the tail of his shirt, he pulls his dress shirt off over his head without unbuttoning. He unbuckles his belt, unzips and lowers his pants, pulling off pants and silk underwear at the same time. He rummages through his pants pocket for a sample size bottle of body wash. My lips smirk, noting that nothing is more comforting than a Dom who comes prepared. Even before he starts lathering me, I know what the fragrance will be.
Ocean Breeze: A Bay Spa Luxuriant.
It is Garrett’s signature scent, fresh and breezy
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with a touch of citrus. He will wash from my body the scent that I have come to think of as Lord Fyre.

Does he really think he can wash the fragrance from my mind? I do not have a name for the scent that is Lord Fyre, but I know I will never forget it.

He steps under the warm spray one more time before stepping back and holding his arms open to me.

“Come here.”

I step close to him, my body wrapped in my own arms. He turns me so that my back is to him. I only realize his intention when I feel his fingers easing through my hair, lather building, the fresh clean scent filling the shower enclosure. His hands leave my hair, drawing lather down my neck and over my shoulders as he kneads and rubs. His fingers are magic and, for the first time in months, I feel the muscles in my neck and shoulders relax. I didn’t realize how tense I was until my body goes soft beneath his touch. The shower spray hits me in the chest and I close my eyes, relaxing into the pulse of spray and the magic of his hands.

His fingers slide lower, no longer massaging, just tender strokes of pleasure. Turning my head, I look over my shoulder to see what he is doing, the stroke of his fingers making immediate sense in my head, when I see him touch the edge of a welt. He looks almost reverent when he slides his finger along its length before moving to the next and then the next, touching, stroking.

Each soft touch brings to mind the implement that left the mark.
Riding crop. Cane. Paddle.

Without asking permission, I turn to face him. I touch my fingertips to his lips, asking, “Can you do that to me?”

My question seems to startle him and he stands looking at me in silence. I trace his lips with my fingers then draw both of my hands around his face, holding his face, waiting for his answer.

“It will be weeks before these marks fade. Until they do, I will not touch you, not like that. Only when your skin is healed, all trace of him gone from your flesh, will I touch you like that.”

“But you will?”

“I will bring your darkness, Kitten, you will beg me to Master you.”

* * * *

The water was music in my head only yesterday, but now it is not music. It is ugly and harsh, the waves crashing a hard sound, like a toilet flushing. The sun is hot, baking me, searing me, like the fiery furnace of hell, when yesterday and the day before it was a healing balm on my too pale skin…skin that had gone years without the touch of the sun before Lord Fyre asked me to sit with him—each morning, basking in the sun, basking in his arms. How will I ever enjoy a ray of sun again?

And then there were the nights spent gazing at the stars, the light of the moon witness to the things he did to me.

I remember with dreamlike intensity the events of last night. The bruises are a physical reminder of what broke free in my head. Freedom in pain. Pain that brought clarity of truth. In giving myself purely to pain so intense that for long moments I couldn’t even breathe, I felt wholly alive.

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I close my eyes against the beauty of the sun glinting off the water, my thoughts too chaotic to bear the serenity offered by the scene. Garrett’s words echoing and repeating through my brain in an effort to make me insane, “Did you find your darkness?”

Did I?

I found more than I ever came looking for. Should I laugh? Should I cry? I feel like the monk who found enlightenment and, when asked what it feels like, can only shrug then burst out in hysterical laughter and tears simultaneously. How do I answer the question, “Did I find my darkness?” when in reality, it was never missing. I have owned my darkness all along. It has walked inside me, been a part of me for so long I can’t even remember the time when I was filled with lightness. The only difference was having someone to share it with.

The scariest part is that, in Lord Fyre, I found a man with a core of darkness so deep that it matched my own and, in our time together, I feel we only skimmed the surface of what we could find together. What would become of us if left together longer than the time we had?

The saddest part is that now we will never find out…

What will become of us without the other to share our darkness with?

I am glad that Garrett went downstairs, giving me time alone to collect my thoughts, or maybe he needed time to collect his thoughts.

“…he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”

-Emily Bronte,Wuthering Heights

Garrett

I escape to the kitchen, leaving her alone in the bedroom, knowing that the last thing she needs is to be alone right now. I need to breathe. I counted to ten while still in the bedroom with her, trying to get my anger under control. Right now, I’m counting to ten for the two hundredth time since seeing her on the floor.

I knew he would leave her marked. Hell, I’ve played with him enough to know that he always leaves a mark. But, my God, he left her
marked
.

Large, round, dark purple bruises, thin welts, wide welts, bright red surface stripes and black and blue, deeply bruised stripes so far under the surface that at first glance it could be a shadow but on second glance isn’t going away. Over the next week, or more, they will raise closer to the surface, getting darker before lightening to a horrid shade of green, then finally fading to yellow then nothing.

I know bruises. Leaving a mark or not leaving a mark is part of my day to day business. Some want a trophy, some demand no marks at all. It pays to know how and why bruises form. My knowledge makes me desirable as a Dom, but I think not such a desirable trait in a man. I could tell with a glance how each bruise was made on Kitten’s flesh…paddle, flogger, whip, cane, hand, mouth.

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I don’t want to look at her knowing how each mark was left on her body. I don’t want to know that each mark had a story, a whispered verbal flog or caress that will be remembered by her long after the physical bruises heal.

She will look in the mirror each day, tracing the marks with her fingers. She will trace them, remembering how she received each one as day by day she watches them fade. The memories will grow more important to her with each passing day. As each mark fades into oblivion, she will note it, she will cry over its loss. I know because she did the same for me when I disappeared from her life, calling me, leaving message after message chronicling her loss of connection with me. Bruised, she was sad, lonely.

Healed, she became devastated. I will not leave her time or energy to mourn him with such ambition.

Lord Fyre is gone. The sooner she forgets him the better off we will be. I want her to forget him, so that she can remember how badly she wanted me.

Sitting in his kitchen, I have a straight view into his living room and it takes me a moment to realize what I am staring at. When I realize, I stand and walk forward, closer to his fireplace, where hanging above the mantle is a framed portrait of Kitten. For a moment, I think it must be airbrushed, a fake background, but on second glance realize no airbrushing took place. She is beautiful. Bound in one of Lord Fyre’s classic Shibari designs, she is caught in rope meant to represent a mermaid’s tail, hands caught behind her, bamboo gag looking quite uncomfortable, but it is not the rope, or even the woman, that makes the captured moment so breathtaking. It is the stark beauty of the sea storm framing the woman…boiling waves against a granite sky cleaved in two by a bright yellow streak of lightning. The woman caught in the tempest, a siren beckoning with terror-filled eyes, is merely an object caught in the brutality of it all.

If Thomas was here I’d hurt him.

I told him of her fear of storms not to use that knowledge against her, but so that he would comfort her.

God damn, he is such a sadist.

I close my eyes and count to ten again.

“What scares you, Garrett Lawrence?” he’d asked me once, so long ago that the memory seems only a remembered dream.

Then, I hadn’t answered him. In the silence that’d followed he’d jerked the chain attaching my nipples to a cock ring. The pain I didn’t mind, even though I knew he’d make it worse. I’d closed my eyes, clenched my jaw. Ready for the next jolt of pain. Stubborn.

I didn’t expect gentleness but that’s exactly what came next. He ran his fingers lightly down my spine, followed the curve of my hip, and cupped my ass in his hands. He pressed himself into me, shoulder to thigh. He still wore his clothes, but I could feel his hard length pressed into my bare pelvis.

“I enjoy you, Garrett.” He rubbed his rougher cheek on my smooth one, whispering against me. “Your will amuses me, but don’t fool yourself for a minute. I will discover your scary places. You will wish I hadn’t but I will and then you will barter with your soul to escape the terror I will feed your mind. You see, it’s a gift…for you. Only in that moment when you are scared to death can you find the kind of pleasure that poets write about, that you dream about—and once you experience it, you’ll want it again so desperately that you will beg me to take you back to that place.

How right he’d been when he discovered my fear, using it, warping it, making my fear and my need become one through the link of mind-blowing pleasure. Years later, I dream about it still…the fear, the
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pleasure—him.

Kitten will never forget Lord Fyre.

I have to get out of this house, away from all things Thomas before I do something drastic—like call LAX and demand a flight toCairo so that I can kick some serious ass. Opening my eyes, I look down at myself, barefoot, wrapped in one of Thomas’ many silk robes, wondering just how far I would get if I took drastic measures—not far, knowing Thomas. I might get toCairo , but if he doesn’t want to be found—and my guess based on his mood before leaving, he doesn’t—I’d never find him.

Shaking my head and sighing heavily, I face the truth of my predicament. I caused this…every bit of it. If I hadn’t abandoned Kitten in the first place, none of this would have happened. She needed a Master, and with painful honesty I am man enough to admit that if not me, Lord Fyre would have been my pick for her. I can even say I saw this coming. Like a moth to the flame, she was drawn to him, and if only I’d been there as the brighter light, maybe I could have kept her fascination from becoming this.