Taken by Chance (20 page)

“Oh
God
,” she cried, half-laughing as the
feather came between her legs from behind, darted in and out, gone before she
could totally process what had happened.

Then several sharp
blows to her ass, one, two, three, each one spiking pain and pleasure to her
clit. She could feel her pulse between her legs again, could feel it start to
build and swell.

She so badly
wanted to see him, wanted to be able to prepare for whatever came next. In the
past she’d hadn’t been able to relax enough into being blindfolded to truly appreciate
how powerless she felt without sight. It was the one sense she depended upon
the most, the one thing she absolutely needed to make sense of the world, and
she’d given it to him.

She was utterly,
completely, under his power.

chapter
23

“Walk forward,” he
said.

His hand was flat
on her back, pushing her and guiding her at the same time. Walking was another
thing she didn’t expect to be so difficult, but just the act of putting one
foot in front of the other took on new significance without sight—and
without arms. Hers were still very effectively bound behind her.

It felt like an
eternity before her legs bumped up against Chance’s bed. Everything felt
different, alien.

Even frightening.
Frightening, and yet safe, with Chance.

“One knee up,” he
said, his other hand on her stomach now, balancing her. “Then the other.”

Climbing up on a
bed was surprisingly difficult with bound hands.
And
blindfolded.
Everything,
everything,
seemed calculated to emphasize how helpless she was.

How needy she was.

How much she
wanted him, inside her.

His hands applied
pressure, bending her at the waist until her chest and shoulders came into
contact with something soft—pillows? She turned her to the side and tried
to relax. It left her ass up in the air, her knees apart, her arms behind her
back, and her cheek pressed into cool, soft linen.

Open. Vulnerable.

She didn’t think
she’d be able to get up on her own—she’d lose her balance and fall,
blindly. That feeling of not being able to move was more restraining than any
chains or cuffs. She wouldn’t move until he was done with her.

Oh God.

Drops of thick,
cold lube fell on her ass, and she clenched at the thought of what would happen
next, what he promised her would happen—if he wanted her ass, it was his
for the taking, served up right in front of him.

He chuckled. “Not
yet.”

Instead there was
the now familiar feel of a plug, even bigger than the last time. She whimpered,
and he slipped a finger inside her vagina, as though just to say hi. He laughed
when she bore down on him, a reflex at this point.

“You can do this,”
he said. “Relax into it.”

She thought of all
the other times he’d done this, how each time there was a moment when she was
sure it was impossible, and did her best to relax. This one was worse, for that
moment, bigger and tougher, and her body resisted—until it didn’t.

She gave a small
little cry as the plug filled her, jolting awake a part of her body that was
still new to this, sending fiery waves of sensation coursing through her. It
was, for the briefest second, overwhelming, and then it ebbed, and in its wake
was the most pressing, driving need to be filled.

She groaned.

“I want to play
first,” he said, almost to himself, and then there was something pushing its
way into her vagina. Not as big as Chance, not nearly, but plastic, hard,
textured. And she already had a butt plug inside her.

He couldn’t
possibly…

He could. And he
did.

Lena moaned loudly
as he pushed the vibe into her, the feeling of being full now complete. He just
kept pushing her, filling her, until she felt like a balloon ready to
pop—she needed to come.

“Chance,” she
panted.

She was farther
gone than she’d known; words wouldn’t come.

He turned on the
vibrator.

She was pretty
sure she screamed. Yelled. Chance started to fuck her with it, moving it in and
out of her with cruel slowness, twisting it so she felt the texture, raking it
across her most sensitive nerves. It might have been the fastest orgasm in
history.
Fast, but not weak.
He put his hand on her
back, pressing her down into the pillows, just as she began to come, and not
being able to move when the waves hit meant there was nowhere for the sensation
to go but back inside her, folding in on itself, doubling and redoubling, until
the resonance tore another scream from her throat.

She felt his hand
on her butt, gripping her, as he pulled the vibe out of her. Immediately she
missed it, missed the feeling of fullness, and he must have been able to tell,
because he laughed.

“Now I’m going to
take you,” he said. “The way I’ve wanted you. Hard.”

And he drove into
her in one full stroke and she knew she cried out. Sobbed. Screamed. He was so
perfect, so hot and thick, a little rough and very, very deep inside her.
Chance fucked her like he said he would—hard, for his pleasure—and
as soon as Lena thought of that she came again, not as quick to peak as the
last time, but pulsing, squeezing, clenching around him for what seemed like
forever.

He pulled out of
her with a growl, and she knew he hadn’t come. She was dazed, blind, and before
she knew it he had uncuffed her wrists and flipped her over onto her back. She
was dragged up the bed and her wrists were again quickly cuffed, this time
above her head and attached to something on the headboard. Chance lifted her
legs one at a time and attached cuffs just above the knee, so her legs were
bent and spread.

Then something
began pulling on her legs.

He’d attached the
cuffs to leads somewhere above her head, maybe where her wrists were bound, and
he was pulling on it so that her legs were pulled up, her knees by her head,
and spread as far as they would go.

If she thought she
was open and vulnerable before…

She felt pressure
on the plug. Jesus. He was moving it around inside of her, reminding her of
just what he was going to take. She wanted to move her hips, to move with him,
to do
anything
, and still she
couldn’t. Her butt was lifted slightly off the bed, her arms and legs bound:
she had no leverage, no movement.

She felt his
breath on her thighs just moments before, but still she wasn’t prepared for his
tongue, inside her, probing. Lapping. He licked her from her entrance up to her
clit, and then his tongue was working that swollen, intense bundle of nerves
until she screamed again. She tried to writhe; all she had was sound, and she
made a lot of it.

The contractions
welled up from deeper inside her this time, like she’d been primed, her muscles
warmed up, and now her entire body was in on it, pulsing and contracting and
beating in time to a rhythm that quickly overtook her whole being.

She rattled the
leads against the headboard.

“Goddamn, you are
beautiful,” she heard Chance say.

His hands were on
her body then, soft and firm, rubbing down her trembling muscles, warming her
damp skin. It seemed like a long time before she floated back into the present.

“How are your arms
and legs?” he asked. “How’s your circulation?”

Lena licked her
lips. She could talk. Probably.

“I’m ok,” she
said.

“Good.”

And then she felt
it: more lube. He pushed the vibrator back into her vagina in one savage
thrust, and Lena moaned. She was past anything, any thought, and
fight,
just ready to take whatever he would give her.

God, it felt good.

The plug moved
slightly, and she realized he was pulling it out, and for just a second she was
disappointed.
Just a second.
And then more cool lube,
this time on her asshole, and Chance’s strong, patient fingers, working it into
her flesh, testing her.

She could feel it
too—she was stretched.

Ready.

Oh God.

“Take a deep
breath,” he said.

His cock pressed
against the tight ring and immediately she thought,
I can’t
.
Too much.
Too
big.
With the vibe in her vagina she honestly didn’t know if she could
do this, but she wanted him, so, so badly. She gulped down air and tried to
remember: breathe, bear down,
relax
.

He pushed into her
with that same
pop
, that same
ohnoicant
followed by
more
. She wanted more.
She could tell it was just the head of
him, that
he
wasn’t seated deeply inside. The pressure, the
need
, was almost unbearable.

“Chance,” she
croaked.

“Slow,” he said.

More lube. He
forced himself farther inside her, making her yelp and pull at her restraints.
It felt too big, and yet she wanted more. She was stretched to the limit, so
full she could burst, and all she wanted was for him to
move
.

“Almost,” he said.

One last push, and
Lena thought she would break. Her eyes were wide open behind her blindfold, her
mouth open in a silent cry, overwhelmed by the stretch…

And then that
faded, and she was left with every single muscle in her body primed and tight,
ready for release. She needed him. Now.

“Chance…”

The blindfold came
off. Lena blinked into the light, adjusting. Chance hovered over her, supported
by his two strong arms on either side, his eyes…

“Look at me.”

She locked her
eyes with his and he started to move. Slowly. So, so slowly, his eyes
never leaving
hers. She didn’t think to speak, wouldn’t have
known what to say if she had. She didn’t need to. Everything she needed was
right there in front of her.

He rocked her to
another shattering orgasm.

Her memory was
spotty for a time after that. She remembered that he carried her to the shower,
after she was too weak to stand, and cleaned them both. She remembered him
holding her, like he always did afterwards. She remembered thinking how lucky she
was to fall asleep in those arms.

She tried to think
of all these things when she woke up in the middle of the night, next to
Chance, and felt the panic.

It wasn’t the same
as all those other times; it wasn’t primarily defensive. It was raw. It was
that, in the aftermath of all that, Lena didn’t have the strength to lie to
herself. And when all those defenses fell away, what she was left with was the
bare truth that she loved him.

It was terrifying.

It was beautiful,
and happy, and full of so much promise and risk, and it was terrifying. She
tried it out in her
head first
:
I love him
.

Yup
.

Still true. And
she didn’t have a panic attack—not quite.

She lay awake for
hours trying to get up the strength to say it. Chance slept next to her on his
side, one huge arm thrown over her body. Just his arm was heavy enough that she
had to move it off of her chest so she could breathe. She cuddled into him, her
face close to his, and watched him sleep.

Then she tried it.

“I love you, too,”
she whispered.

Her chest tightened,
her lungs felt like they had a hole in them, but she tried to quell it, stop it
before it could take root. It was an epic
struggle taking
place in her relatively tiny body, silent and immobile, weak and strong at the
same time.

The one thought
she couldn’t kill, the one thing that kept returning to bring the dread and the
panic back, was this: love wasn’t enough. He said he loved her, but he hadn’t
had to deal with her too long. He hadn’t had to deal with her freaking out the
way she was now.

She hadn’t even
been able to say it back. None of it was fair. None of it was what he deserved.

Even worse? That
slow, creeping feeling that she wasn’t able to hold off any longer, the one
telling her to run away and hide before she got hurt again—that need to
flee wasn’t fair to Chance, either.

Lena felt a tear
run down the side of her face.

“I need to talk to
Thea,” she whispered.

chapter
24

Lena might have
thought twice about knocking on Thea’s door in the middle of the night if her
lights weren’t all on. That was unusual;
Thea
wasn’t
really a night owl.

It was only when
Thea opened the door in a nightgown that Lena got worried.

“Thea, I’m sorry,
I know it’s the middle of the night, I just—”

“You know you’re
lucky I’m alone?” Thea said, not quite able to keep herself from smiling.

That shut Lena up.

“Wait, really?”

“I’m not
dead
, honey, I do still converse with
other human beings from time to time. I’ll tell you all about him in a second.
Let me make some tea, and then you can tell me all about whatever’s got you up
in the middle of the night.”

Just being in
Thea’s kitchen was a relief. Thea, who was the one person she had let her guard
down around besides Chance, and
that
had taken years
of hanging out with the woman daily. Lena always imagined that this was how
comforting chats with your mother were supposed to go—a warm kitchen,
tea, someone who knew you better than you knew yourself. She considered herself
lucky that she got a second shot to have them, this time with someone who
actually cared about her.

She had no idea
what she’d do without Thea.

“What’s wrong with
your arm?” Lena asked.

Thea was favoring
her left arm, holding it close to her body like she’d hurt it. Tea was
marginally harder to make in that position.

“It’s nothing,”
Thea said, shrugging. “Just been bothering me today. Part of getting older.”

“You going to tell
me about your boyfriend?”

Thea turned and
scowled. “Don’t make it sound like I’m thirteen. It’s much more dignified than
that.”

Lena’s jaw
dropped.

“Ha!” Thea
cackled. “Dignified. Yeah, I went down to the country club and snagged the
fattest guy chomping down on a cigar I could find. Please, Lena.”

“You are acting
thirteen, FYI.”

“My prerogative.
Falling in love makes you dumb at any age.”

Lena put down her
tea, unable to keep herself from smiling. “In love?”

Thea put her nose
up in the air and dunked a cookie into her tea. “Well, what do you think I’ve
been doing while you’ve been off having some sexual adventure? Sitting at
home?”

“Where did you
find him? A casino?
A strip club?
An underground
cockfight?”

Thea laughed
again, and it made her look about ten years younger until she coughed slightly.
She sipped her tea slowly, but Lena didn’t miss the frown on her face. She
didn’t know what to make of it.

“The beach. He was
painting the most hideous portraits, and when I realized he thought they were
funny, I asked him out.”

“Name?”

“John.”
 

“Age?”

“Hush.”

“Occupation?”

“World’s most
fabulous man. No, silly, he’s retired. Used to be a stockbroker, now he has a
houseboat.”

“A houseboat! Are
you guys going to go on cruises? Like up and down the coast?”

Thea narrowed her
eyes over her teacup, and the effect was impressively menacing. Lena knew she’d
been caught.

“You didn’t come
over here to talk about my love life or houseboats,” Thea said. “Now you’re
just avoiding. Out with it, while I’m still young.”

Lena looked down;
she had destroyed her napkin, tearing it up into tiny little pieces. She hadn’t
touched her cookie. And she could feel the constriction building in her chest.

“You’re lost your
mind over Chance, haven’t you?” Thea asked.

“How did you
know?”

“Please. Look at
you. I’ve never seen you so wrapped up in anything that you didn’t call for
weeks at a time. You look like you haven’t slept in ages, and now you look
miserable. Obviously it’s love.”

Lena grimaced.
Yeah, Thea was more right than she knew. Love was the whole problem.

“He told me he
loves me,” she whispered.

Thea stared at
her. Finally, she said, “Let me get my mourning dress.”

“C’mon, be nice,
Thea. I’m really messed up over this.”

“Because you love
him, too?”

Lena sighed.
“Yes.”

“You know, for
most people this doesn’t constitute a problem,” Thea said.

“I know. That’s
why it
is
a problem. I’m too much of
a mess. I just…I can’t do that to him.”

Lena didn’t want
to see her friend’s face as she said that, maybe because she was afraid it was
as stupid as it sounded, maybe because she was just too raw already. That’s how
she missed what happened next.

~ * ~ * ~

Chance woke up and
instantly knew Lena was gone.

It was the
strangest thing—like a transfer of the kind of situational awareness he
remembered from military missions. He just knew. Gone. His mind ran efficiently
through all the possibilities. Most probably she was reverting to “irrevocably
skittish” form
;
most likely destination:
Thea’s
house.
He would find her
,
they’d talk
. It was time to stop coddling her.

He hunted down his
phone and sent
Thea
a single text message: “She with
you? She
ok
?”

~ * ~ * ~

Lena thought Thea
was just prolonging the silence to make a point. To let the ridiculousness of
Lena’s fears sink in. Stubbornly, she rinsed her teacup out extra thoroughly,
feeling dumber by the minute.

When she turned
around, Thea was pale.
Short of breath.
Clutching at
her arm.

Funny how fear
works. That moment seemed to last forever.

“Thea?” Lena
asked. “Thea, what’s happening?”

Thea shook her
head. “I don’t know,” she said. “Can’t breathe. My chest…tight…”

Thea wasn’t even
sitting upright now, just slumped over the table, like she didn’t have the
strength. Lena was petrified. She fumbled for a phone, sure one moment that
this was an emergency, sure the next that Thea would recover in a second and
make fun of her for panicking. The operator picked up and Lena felt such a rush
of relief as she explained the situation, sure that the operator was going to
tell her they’d send someone, but probably it was fine, Thea was going to be
fine, everything—everything was fine.

“An ambulance is
on the way. Do you have any aspirin in the house?”

Lena felt cold.
Aspirin.

Thea was having a
heart attack.

~ * ~ * ~

Chance must have
been in the shower when the ambulance came, because he didn’t hear the sirens.
If he’d heard the sirens, he would have known right away. As it was, he came
out in his towel and saw the lights, the red and blue lights, so weakly
reflecting off the wall on the roof garden that he might have missed them.

He felt ice cold.

Walked out. Saw
Lena’s house.
Thea’s house.
An ambulance, driving
away, sirens blaring, lights flashing.

By the time he had
his clothes on, there was a text waiting for him. Thea had had a heart attack.
Lena was going to the hospital. No one was ok.

He found Lena in a
waiting room looking like hell. Nobody looked good in hospital waiting rooms,
and, as if to emphasize that point, every hospital he’d ever been in went for
fluorescent lighting. So a woman who was already distraught and crying her eyes
out had that to look forward to, too. He’d seen people get upset about the
stupidest things in hospitals—you can’t do anything about what’s actually
upsetting you, so you go mad over stupid shit.

Whatever. He was
just glad to find her. She was beautiful to him, even when she was sobbing.

Neither of them
said anything. She stood there, under buzzing, flickering lights, eyes red,
cheeks wet, looking scared as hell, and he thought:
Ok, no talking
. He just walked up to her and wrapped her in his
arms.

They stayed like
that for a long, long time. Long enough for her shoulders to stop shaking, long
enough for her to relax and then tense up all over again, clearly long enough
for her to start thinking herself into a hole again.

He knew what she
was going to say before she opened her mouth.

“I’m sorry,
Chance,” she said, hoarse from grief. “I can’t handle this.”

Normally Chance
wasn’t one to argue with people about what they did and didn’t need, what they
could and couldn’t do. Wasn’t his
business.
Only this
time, it was. This time it was Lena. And she was wrong.

“Which thing,
Lena?”

“Any of this. I
can’t handle losing…” She looked back in the direction of the emergency room
and choked on her words.

“They haven’t told
you anything yet?”

Lena shook her
head, mute. Chance held her face close to his.

“I’m not going
anywhere,” he said. He meant it.

But Lena just kept
shaking her head, and he could see already the storm building inside her, that
there were too many things going on at once, that a woman who was already
scared had just been overloaded.

“No,” she said.
“Chance, I can’t handle…oh God, I can’t handle any of this.”

“Doesn’t change
how I feel.”

Tears welled up in
her eyes again, and Chance could have kicked himself.

“No, that’s just
it. I can’t afford to feel anything right now. I am too screwed up, Chance, I
can’t…”

“
Shh
…” he said, holding her again.

“I
can’t
,” she said again, but her arms
held him tight.

“Somebody screwed
you up good, huh?”

“No worse than any
others. I got kicked out a lot, ended up on my own. It doesn’t really matter,”
she said, pushing off his chest, “whether my mother was terrible, or people
took advantage of me, or whatever. Plenty of people get over stuff like that, I
know, I just…I can’t. I’m not strong enough to get over it, and it’s messed me
up completely, and
I just can’t,
can’t
do that to you, too
. I can’t lose Thea, and I can’t…
It won’t work, Chance. It’ll break me.”

She broke away
from him completely now, took a few steps back, as if to reinforce the space
between them. The freaking gulf she was trying to put there. Chance wasn’t
fazed
. He hurt for her, he hurt to see her in so much pain,
but one thing had crystallized for him perfectly: it was a problem of faith, so
to speak.
All of it.
She really didn’t believe that
the world would treat her right, she didn’t believe in herself, and she was
cutting herself off before she got hurt even worse.

It made a grim
kind of sense. And it made Chance suddenly understand exactly what it was that
Lena did for him—she
believed in
him
. Unquestioningly, in a way he’d never deserved. And it had made him
better.

This woman who had
no faith in herself at all, had put enough faith in him to make him a better
man.

He knew what he
had to do.

Chance waited
while a man in scrubs carrying a clipboard came out to talk to her—he
should have guessed Lena would be legally empowered for Thea. He bet it ran the
other way, too, and the thought made him briefly happy, to know Lena had
trusted someone. It made him even happier when he saw the relief on her face, when
she smiled through tears.

“Good news?” he
asked, gently.

She nodded,
suddenly looking very tired. “She’s going to be ok. Well, as ok as you can be
after a heart attack. It wasn’t a big one, but she’s going to be here for a
little while, and I have to go get her things, and…”

She looked back at
Chance and met his eyes. The sadness in her eyes killed him.

“I am so sorry,”
she said.

He took her hand
in his.

“Lena, sweetheart,
I love you, but you’re wrong,” he said. “It will work, you do deserve it, you
can afford it, and I’m going to prove it to you. You keep your phone. And you
call me if you need anything.”