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Buylinks above
Make me Yours Evermore, Book 3 , Pierced Hearts series Publisher: Cari Silverwood Release date: December 20th, 2013 Length: Novel of 85,000 words Genre: M/f/M BDSM dark erotic romance crossed with capture fantasy with some f/f scenes. Cover Art: Thomas Dorman aka Dr Benway on facebook and Deviantart, (thomas@helicopterdesign.co.za) |
Taking what you want may come at a terrifying price.
Chris calls his darkest, nastiest fantasy into the light of day when he has to kidnap Kat to save a friend. For years, he’s wanted to bring her to her knees.
But claiming her draws attention. Andreas wants to save Kat, until he sees her response to raw male dominance.
More dangerous are the human traffickers, who regard the acquisition and selling of women as a very high stakes business. And they’re watching. Everything.
Death. The perversion of love. The loss of freedom.
Sometimes there is no choice.
Warning: Capture fantasy; dubious consent; anal play; strap-on; M/f/M and f/f scenes; BDSM themes including caning, spanking, bondage, and piercing, as well as some upside-down naughtiness.
Also contains one Dom gone bad who believes obsession means never having to say you’re sorry.
Also contains one Dom gone bad who believes obsession means never having to say you’re sorry.
Website Reviews
"This book is about lust, desire, control and corruption. But, above all else, it’s about power. Held absolutely and resolutely over another human being. Consensual? No. But compelling and intoxicating, nonetheless." ~ Behind the Chintz Curtain
"The Pierced Heart Series has brought me to my knees, again ... how close is obsessiveness to love and can the line be crossed?"
~ Guilty Pleasures Book Reviews
"Man oh man, this book was hardcore dark erotica. Well written story, well developed plot and characters, titillating (read: panty melting) non & dub consent BDSM and sex." ~ Lina's Accolades and Book Burnings
"no matter how disturbing, how provocative or thought-provoking this might be, Cari always sucks me back in and makes me want something I never thought I would crave." ~ Shayna Renee's Spicy reads
"This book is about lust, desire, control and corruption. But, above all else, it’s about power. Held absolutely and resolutely over another human being. Consensual? No. But compelling and intoxicating, nonetheless." ~ Behind the Chintz Curtain
"The Pierced Heart Series has brought me to my knees, again ... how close is obsessiveness to love and can the line be crossed?"
~ Guilty Pleasures Book Reviews
"Man oh man, this book was hardcore dark erotica. Well written story, well developed plot and characters, titillating (read: panty melting) non & dub consent BDSM and sex." ~ Lina's Accolades and Book Burnings
"no matter how disturbing, how provocative or thought-provoking this might be, Cari always sucks me back in and makes me want something I never thought I would crave." ~ Shayna Renee's Spicy reads
Behind the Chintz Curtain
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Guilty Pleasures Book Reviews
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Lina's Accolades & Book Burnings
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Make me Yours Evermore
Pierced Hearts, Book 3
Chapter One
Kat
Dark. Then light filtered in. The fluttering wash of light, dark, light, dark occupied me as we bumped over something. My shoulder would feel numb and I’d shift but my hands were tied. Not much I could do.
Bondage wasn’t my thing.
That thought popped up and stayed a while before it drifted away like so many others. My heart beat erratically. My thoughts followed like sheep. I struggled and caught that thought again. Bondage wasn’t my thing. Then what was I doing tied up? My wrists were trapped before me. My ankles were caught. My mouth had something in it. My eyes were blind and I couldn’t lift my eyelids – trapped also. A blindfold?
Chris. Panic slithered in and with it came clarity. Fuck him. He’d done this. I needed to get loose. I bit down on the gag as I writhed, but solid walls encased me and the gag stayed where it was. I lay on my side. My elbow thumped painfully into something above me. My bare toes did too at my front. My breathing rasped wetly, bubbling past the thing in my mouth. Just lifting my ribs became a hundred, thousand times more important than anything.
I dragged in air as something rocked whatever coffin it was I occupied. Distant voices. Man? Or more? Men? There seemed two different voices.
My teeth sank into rubber. My tongue tip slipped over the wet roundness.
Ball gag.
The bastard. He kidnapped me. He put it there between my lips. I remembered him, remembered his words.
“I’m going to get into your head right there. Where you can never ever get me out.”
“You’re going to be blind for a few days. When I take this off, you’ll be somewhere far from civilization. There will be no one who can help you. There will only be me.”
I knew where I was. There’d been an engine noise before, long ago. A car. He had me in a car. I slumped. Drowsiness returned and snuggled into my mind. I was hot and tired and breathing meant more to me than getting loose. Breathe. One last kick. Maybe that other man will hear me. Maybe he’ll let me go.
I kicked and nearly broke my toe on timber. But metal creaked and the car rocked again. I listened, ears straining. Waves? Seagulls screeching? Brighter light flared through the tape across my eyes. Someone had turned up the volume on the sound. There were distant voices. Waves. Yes. Was I still on the island?
“Put that down, man. Get out of the car and walk away.”
“The fuck I will. You’ve got a woman tied up in here! What the fuck...is this a scene thing? One of your kinky pretend things?”
“Andreas. You need to leave. Now.”
“Okay. Okay. Sorry. The shit you get up to. Give me a call when you and her have finished fucking your brains out. Or whatever you intend to do.”
Going? He was going? Despite the sogginess permeating my brain, I knew that was bad. I needed to make noise. I tried to speak but only gurgles emerged. I coughed and found liquid clogging my throat where words should have been.
“She’s choking!”
“Fuck. The dose might have been a bit high. Listen. Ignore anything she says.”
Fingers fumbled at my mouth. The thing was pulled from me, leaving my lips feeling bereft without the pressure. I breathed. Deep, cool air. Coughed again. The fog closed in.
Storms ahead. Words of no sense popped up when I needed sense. What was that other word?
“You okay?” Thick fingers brushed my cheek. Gentle.
No. I’m not. I’m not. I’m… “Kidnapped,” I croaked.
“What? What did you say?”
“Andreas. Ignore. You don’t butt in on a scene.”
I swallowed then choked on that word again. “Kidnapped. Please. Need help.” I was blind and my tongue was made of sludge but somewhere in front of me was a man who could save me.
“Chris. What is this? What shit is this? Dose? Even I know you don’t use drugs with BDSM.”
Someone sighed – long and deep. Chris spoke. “Right. Let me explain, Andreas. There are good reasons.”
“Jesus. Reasons?” His voice rose high at the end. A long pause.
“I can explain.”
“She’s... How can you possibly explain this? You’re more than a brother to me, you know that. But this...this had better be good. Like, I mean, better than anything you’ve ever explained...ever.”
Chris chuckled. That alone made the hairs on my neck rise. So wrong.
“I need to make sure she doesn’t call out. Smaller gag. Okay?”
“You want to put a gag back on her?”
Hope kindled. The man sounded doubtful. He’d get the cops now.
“Yes. She can breathe through it.”
Though my tongue seemed disconnected from me, though my temples ached with each thump of my blood, I strained to hear. Andreas’s reply was a long time coming.
“Mate, I can’t see how you’re going to get out of this one.”
“Wait.”
No way. I opened my mouth and sucked in air so I could yell only to have another ball pushed into my mouth. I squirmed and tried to shake my head but a hand held my face. My struggles grew weaker. Too much effort. Too much trouble to fight the cold fog that ate my thoughts, leeched at my muscles.
“Good girl,” I heard whispered from inches away. “Stay there quiet while we talk.”
The whispers repeated. Good girl.
Good? Not me. Not me... Never me. FieryKat. I will fuck you up, boys. Somehow. Just give me time. I will...
Inside me, the black fog spread and swallowed me down.
Chapter Two
Andreas
For once, the view out the windscreen of Chris’s four-wheel drive was dirty. I frowned. In a long wooden box behind these front seats, a woman was...tied up, gagged, and blindfolded. And drugged. While I struggled to cope with that concept, my mind ran off on a tangent.
Dusty windscreen. Chris always had a reason.
Ah. You couldn’t see in, could you? Not easily. He’d probably chucked a bucket of dirt over it.
The man, my friend, sighed and ran a hand through his sun-bleached blond hair. “Do you want me to explain or would you rather I answer your questions? Andreas?”
I shook my head while I stared past his ear. Then I met his eyes. We’d always been honest with each other. “Does it matter? This is insane.”
Through the dusty glass, I could see other people lounging against their cars. As the bow of the ferry carved the waves, sea water sprayed high into the air. A brisk wind rattled the door and went whistling away. Sunlight glinted warmly off metal. Even with the door shut, we had to raise our voices to be heard over the ferry’s engine noise. All...yeah, fucking normal stuff.
I swallowed. Chris just sat there, giving me time. Least he hadn’t pulled out a knife. But was this the same man I knew?
As if to remind me, a dull knocking came from the box. There were air holes and a metal mesh, but if I heard that gurgly breathing again I was freeing her ASAP.
“Fuck it. What are you doing? Go on. Explain.” I glanced at my watch. “This is surreal. You’ve got ten minutes before we reach the harbor.”
“Truthfully, I’d rather you just leave.”
“And forget I saw this?” I thumbed toward the box. “I can’t. Couldn’t. It’s too late for that.” In a moment of clarity, I was glad I’d decided to get into Chris’s four-wheel drive. Whoever it was back there, she needed me.
Again with the sigh. But otherwise Chris regarded me levelly with his sharp blue eyes. Not hostile. We were too close for anything nasty to happen between us.
But I had to do something. “Not tempted to throw me over the side for the sharks?”
“Huh.” Chris glanced down at my arm and the scars throbbed as if the damn thing knew it was getting attention. He shook his head then settled his shoulders back into his door. “No. If you have to go to the cops afterward, I can accept that. Life goes on.”
Christ. The man was always so confident. Not a façade either. Just him. Then his jaw moved as if he were chewing.
Maybe this did bother him? Relief flooded me. I didn’t want to see him as Ice Man. No one normal could brush off abducting someone as casually as if they’d found a new paint color they liked.
“Tell me then. Why?”
“If she gets loose.” He jerked his head toward the back of the car, “A friend is likely to go to jail for ten or more years. What he did was something I would have done, you too maybe. He doesn’t deserve it.”
I blinked, thinking as well as I could. “What did he do?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“You can’t?” And that made it so much easier for me to judge this. “Then why her? What did she do? Did she make this up? This thing your friend did?”
“No. She snooped where she shouldn’t have.”
“Uh.” I sat back. “So you’ve done this to her...something thoroughly illegal and dangerous that might get you in jail for fifty years, let alone ten, because she was nosy?”
Chris rubbed his fingers along the steering wheel. An extra hefty gust of wind shook the vehicle. “Partly that, yes. More that a friend needed help.”
She, obviously, wasn’t his friend.
“So...what are you planning to do with her? You’re not, god forbid, killing her?” I knew the answer would be no, but I had to ask.
“You think I would do that?”
I shook my head. Fuck, I hoped not.
“Of course I wouldn’t.”
“And so instead, like a Good Samaritan,” I waved my hand in a vague circle, “you’re planning to set her up for life with a huge lump of money and a mansion in France?”
He laughed. “Comedian.” Chris glanced back toward the box that held the woman. He leaned over, reached between the seats, and lifted the side of the box, keeping his body mostly in the way in case anyone passing by looked in.
Through the gap between my seat and Chris’s body, I studied the woman. Her face slumped in either sleep or unconsciousness. Wrist cuffs locked her hands down onto a metal ring on the box beside her neck. She was breathing fine. The ball of the gag even had a large hole through the middle.
Youngish. Cherry red hair. So bright it must be fake. The edge of a tatt showed on her shoulder.
I wondered what she would look like without the black ball of the gag. My gaze slipped downward to where her breasts were jammed together by the position. The bunched-up pale blue T-shirt had a few specks of blood and grime on it. The neckline showed the top of her red bra. Pretty. Vulnerable. Pity and an urge to help her vied with a deep curiosity as to what she’d look like naked. That my head even went there bothered me. I pulled my gaze away.
Shit. This was like perving on a victim in an ambulance.
“She’s good. Breathing’s settled.” He lowered the side of the box. Despite his nonchalance, I couldn’t help but notice the absolute fascination he had for her, the last second of hesitation as he closed the side. Like he couldn’t tear his eyes away. “Beautiful, isn’t she?”
How did you answer that? I shrugged. “I’m not going there. You still haven’t said what you’re doing with her.”
A line formed between his eyes. At last I’d stirred him. “I’m not going into details.”
Then he waited again. Shit.
“You expect me to leave her with you based on that?”
“Yes. I never wanted you to get in the car. The less you know the better for you, me and her.”
His chest rose and fell in a regular rhythm – too regular, forced perhaps. Or was I reading in things that weren’t there? I needed a fucking lie detector. Wait, no. He wouldn’t lie to me. Would he?
“Well. Too late, I did get in. I emailed you. Tried to phone...” We always hung out together when I visited the island. “When I saw your car, what else do you think I was going to do? Assume you had a woman tied up in the back and leave you be? I thought we’d go to the pub and have a beer somewhere. Have fun. Go fishing, swimming. Fuck some girls. You know...” I faked a laugh. “Shit, now...” I shook my head vigorously. “What are you doing with her? You have to tell me.”
“I don’t want to pull you into this.”
“You have. You’re my best mate. You saved my goddamned worthless life once or twice. I don’t want to dob you in to the cops. Tell me something. I’m not going to walk away. She was having trouble breathing and you never saw it. You want murder on your conscience? Why? What are you doing with her?” I glanced out at the approaching line of the mainland harbor. “Five minutes left.”
Chris rubbed his finger along his nose for a second. “Okay. Do what you want to. “I’m...” He took a deep breath. “I’m keeping her.”
“What?” Oh shit. I remember a drunken night when we’d all spilled our guts.
What are five things you’d most like to do that are illegal. Then we’d shared. A bunch of teenagers at university having a stupid drunken party. The usual. Until I checked what Chris had written as number one on his list. Kidnap a girl and keep her. At the top of mine, I’d written, keep a girl as my slave.
Funny. But ever since then we’d been one. I’d never forgotten the list. We hadn’t always lived in the same place but when we were together we partied and hung out and had great times. Until now.
“The list,” I murmured, so softly he couldn’t possibly hear.
But his eyes narrowed. “I’m driving to the Daintree area. A business friend has loaned me a house there. Somewhere quiet, away from anyone who might see or hear anything. I’m going to make her mine. Going to train her to obey me.”
Shit. My blood thundered. My cock stood up all on its ownsome. This was so wrong that my head was spinning. “You can’t do that.”
“I can. I am. It’s that or let her go to do so much damage to my friend’s life, and now, to mine. She brought this on herself. Now are you going to open that door and walk away?”
What was I going to do? He was blaming her for this? I wrenched my logical brain into gear. “That’s a six-, seven-hour drive. What if she dies? You can’t watch her breathing. You’re driving straight through?” I deadpanned those words but I was fucking tumbling through rapids in my head.
He nodded, pursed his mouth.
I couldn’t leave her with him, but I didn’t want to be with him either. With her...them. I wiped my mouth. “I’m not leaving her alone with you. I’m not having her death on my conscience. I’m coming with you until we sort everything out.”
“You think I’m going to change my mind? I’m going to let her go? She’d go straight to the police and then everyone is up shit creek without a paddle. If you want that just go to the cops yourself, Andreas.”
“I’m coming with you. This way we can figure out some alternative. And I can make sure she’s not going to choke to death.” I had to convince him to release her. I held up my hands. “I’m between jobs. No one’s going to miss me.”
“I wasn’t going to leave her unsupervised, Andreas.” Chris had a knack for knowing when to stop talking. The ferry was angling toward the jetty, engines throbbing loudly. “But okay.”
“Good.” I settled back into the seat. Once we were on the road, I’d prop open the flap to the box so I could keep an eye on the woman.
I attempted to calm my racing heart but some delayed logic snuck in. The box she was in was no spur of the moment thing. How long had he been planning this?
We were close mates but I knew how kinky Chris was and all about his love of BDSM. He’d let me watch him flog a girl once. Even though I could see she wanted it, that scene had fucked me up for days. While I’d watched I’d been a confused mix of aroused and horrified. I’d also seen the steel mask of concentration on his face. Chris was a sadist through and through.
I’d trust him with my damn life, but with this woman? What he might do to her scared me. There was no way I was leaving him alone with her.
Chapter Three
Chris
We left town with no fuss, the tires purring over the Bruce Highway on our way north. As soon as we were past the outer suburbs, I pointed over my shoulder at the box. Andreas propped open the front. Whenever I glanced sideways, I caught him looking back as if studying her. I wasn’t sure what he made of all this, apart from that obvious disapproval and his desire to keep her safe.
In a way, I was glad he was here to watch her. It was safer for her. I just prayed this wouldn’t backfire on Andreas. And I prayed like hell I could get rid of him fast once we got there. I needed to be alone with her. To sit and figure out what I wanted to do to her.
My fingers were hurting I’d clenched the wheel so tightly. Relax. I’d waited so long, thought about this scenario, off and on, much of my adult life, but...I could wait a bit longer.
No matter how well you know someone, as soon as you break the law, everything goes into a cyclonic blender. What would come out when he’d had time to digest all of this?
I hadn’t seen him for a few months. He’d been out on the oil rig in the Bass Strait same as my brother. Soon we might be going separate ways. His wavy black hair ruffled in the breeze when he wound down the window for a while. From beneath the short ochre sleeve of his T-shirt, the scars from the shark attack ran like pale confetti down the muscles of his left forearm. Remnants of a time when he’d needed me. I liked that. My good friends defined my world.
Andreas was a solid man with a solid conscience. That might prove a problem for him.
Me? I’d stick with my decisions, no matter how wrong they might be in a moral world. But I wasn’t in a moral world, hadn’t been since I was twenty-two and uncle had introduced me to shaky accounting.
I tensed my forearms, using the steering wheel to control my frustration. Of all the people to arrive and fuck this up...to maybe, fuck this up.
But...I made a hard and cutting decision then and there. If Andreas decided to hand me to the police I’d go without protest. I wasn’t jeopardizing things with him. No matter how deep into the dark this kink of mine took me. I could be Mister Evil to her, no worries, because it got me off. Not to him.
“You can take off her gag now,” I said over the engine noise.
He nodded and did so. For a few seconds he held the gag before him like it was some creature he’d caught and he was afraid to let it go in case it bit then he wiped it with his T-shirt and placed it back in the box with her.
“I swear I can hear the thoughts running around in your head. If we get stopped or have to slow down near people, drop the flap back down. If the cops stop us for any reason and they find her, pretend you didn’t know she was there.”
He grunted.
Andreas wasn’t normally the quiet sort but he didn’t say another word until we were near the Mount Spec turn-off.
“I want to stop here. You have to free her, Chris.”
Oh shit.
My stomach was so knotted up I’d probably need a valium myself before the day was out. I could have let this go. I could’ve not told Klaus my idea to take Kat out of the equation. But I had.
I hated that Andreas was here with me. This was my messed-up self. Not his doing. If I could’ve pushed him out the moving car without hurting him, I would have.
For most of my adult years I’d had a distant, back-of-the-cupboard, dangerous yearning to go further than BDSM allowed. Kat... Fuck, her prima donna personality and her pseudo-submissive, emotionally distant behavior had triggered every snarling instinct in me to wrestle her down and impose on her a set of laws that would make her behave. Those little shorts she wore, and the curvaceous body underneath, drove me crazy. I’d been allowed to strip them off her a few times when she agreed to scenes, but that had never been enough.
Being able to mark her with red, to make her scream, to run my hands over her hips and ass and, a few times, to get her off with a vibe or my fingers, if anything that had fed my craving.
Some Doms would have nothing to do with her, but me...I only dreamed of what might be possible.
But I never had, truly, been able to make her behave, because I couldn’t. Hard limits, safe and sane, consensual kink – all those drew lines I couldn’t cross.
“I’m not stopping unless you want to get out and take this to the cops. If you’re doing that, I may as well drive us there. If we stop to chat like schoolgirls on a picnic, the drug will be wearing off. I may have to give her more and that adds to the danger.”
The long, dead-straight road unrolling ahead, for the next kilometer, allowed me to drift my thoughts into remembering how Kat had looked back there. Controlled, for once, waiting for me to decide what to do with her. Her eyes half-closed. It was a miracle I’d wanted so badly for so long.
“Fuckit.” Andreas had shut his eyes. Air hissed in through his teeth. “Fuckit. Fuckit. Fuckit. You’re going to hell, you know.”
I shrugged. “Maybe. You don’t need to be here. I promise I’ll take care of her. I can let you out somewhere and you can catch a bus back. Then you can forget this.”
“What’d you drug her with?”
Ignoring me, hey? “You’re a stubborn bastard when you want to be.” I sneaked a look at his earnest face before concentrating on the road again. “Valium. I researched it, Andreas. Doses, effects. It was the safest one and the easiest to get hold of.”
“It’s hours yet to the Daintree. When does it wear off? What if she starts screaming?”
I kept my voice level. “If I have no choice, I’ll give her more.” I hoped he wouldn’t ask how. The answer would freak him out. “It might take four to six hours to wear off. It might take less. It varies from person to person.”
“Uh-huh.”
Andreas seemed to relax at that – as if knowing I’d planned this well had reassured him. I turned the thought over. His response almost said he didn’t want her to escape. Which was curious. I inhaled and the mind-cracking tension ebbed from my muscles.
“You know this is wrong, don’t you?”
“Yes.” A semi-trailer going the other way rocked our vehicle in its wake and I adjusted my hands on the wheel.
“So you’re not going to shoot anyone if things go ass over turkey?”
“No.” I checked him out. Meditative. “You’re still wondering if you should hand me over to law enforcement?”
“No. Hell, no.”
The road thrummed under the wheels. “Yes, I know it’s wrong. Do I care if society condemns me for doing this? Only if I get caught. Will I hurt anyone over this? No, especially not you. I never thought I’d do this. If the opportunity hadn’t arrived, I’d have kept going the way I was.”
“The way you was?” he murmured. “Just BDSM with chicks who said yes, hey?”
“Yep.”
“I keep thinking I’ve fallen into the wrong wardrobe and come out in Narnia or something. Jabberwocky land. Oz, maybe.”
I pulled a contemplative face and nodded. “Oz is close.”
He bit out a laugh. “You know she’s listening? Doped out, but she is. I can see from the way she holds her head. Does that worry you?”
“Let her.” Kat mightn’t remember much of this. I wasn’t sure of the long-term effects. But if she did... If she did, she’d remember her helplessness; remember us casually talking while she was back there unable to do a thing. I liked that. It gave my balls a warm feeling. I wished I could see her expression.
Yet this wasn’t purely sexual. Even after all these years of being a kinkster, I wasn’t sure what it was that grabbed me about dominating a woman sometimes. It just was me.
Not all sexual, but a part of it. I wanted to see her lips wrapped around my cock even if she didn’t want them there. I took a deep shaky breath.
“The Daintree?” Andreas said it quietly, like it was somewhere interesting and this was a normal holiday chat.
“Yes.”
“I always wanted to go there.”
“Me too.” I turned up the air-con. I didn’t want Kat getting heat stroke. Despite the autumn weather, the box might become a sauna if the tropical sun heated the car.
“We’ll have to stop to get petrol along the way. And I’ll find somewhere isolated, off the road, where we can let her out to go to the toilet. But I’ll have to watch her. To make sure she doesn’t get away.” I eyed him briefly then went back to looking at the road, then back to him again for a moment.
He swallowed and kept his gaze focused ahead. “Okay. When we get there, you and me, we have to talk.”
“Sure.”
I was beginning to wonder what Andreas was thinking about all this. Like any man, he’d have his little fetishes. We all had something dirty we’d like to do, even if we suppressed the ideas. But give us half a chance and a willing...or unwilling victim...most of us would do some damn kinky things to a woman. For some that meant coming on their faces or tearing off their panties and gagging them with them. For others it was ass sex, or milder things. Few men had the guts to let loose the dark beast inside them.
Me, I had a million ideas. Most I’d done at some time, to someone.
Part of Kat’s appeal was the challenge. She’d never submitted to anyone properly. Not that I’d ever seen. Bitch Queen was her true name. She’d never even let me fuck her. I wanted to bring her low, so low she would kiss the dirt for me.
She was going to find out how hard-ass I could truly be when there was nothing stopping me.
Part of it, and just musing on this made that red scintillating need slither through me, part was I just wanted to hurt her and see her take it because she had no choice. Fucked up? Yeah. But it was a beautiful sort of fucked up. I wondered why I always imagined it as a red need? The link to blood probably. Red had a certain distinction to it.
Pain – red.
Fear – black.
Graphic novels followed that sort of color scheme.
Which made sadism a mix of both? There’d be no green though, definitely. Or blue. Screams, in a comic, should be orange. Crap. I was going a bit crazy with this.
Maybe I shouldn’t be imagining what I was planning to do while I was driving?
In those few crystal clear times between us, I was sure I’d seen in Kat a yearning, like she wanted something she couldn’t quite reach. The dominant and submissive relationship, even the malformed one we had shared, let me see things she wanted to hide from everyone. It was a matter of listening hard enough, and paying attention.
In a perverse way, I was sure she wanted someone to make her do what she didn’t want. That was common in submissives, and the Dom’s role is to show them how to let go of control. The difference was that Kat never did let go. She clung to the edge with both hands.
Well, I’d pried away those fingers, and now she was going to learn to fly.
Pierced Hearts, Book 3
Chapter One
Kat
Dark. Then light filtered in. The fluttering wash of light, dark, light, dark occupied me as we bumped over something. My shoulder would feel numb and I’d shift but my hands were tied. Not much I could do.
Bondage wasn’t my thing.
That thought popped up and stayed a while before it drifted away like so many others. My heart beat erratically. My thoughts followed like sheep. I struggled and caught that thought again. Bondage wasn’t my thing. Then what was I doing tied up? My wrists were trapped before me. My ankles were caught. My mouth had something in it. My eyes were blind and I couldn’t lift my eyelids – trapped also. A blindfold?
Chris. Panic slithered in and with it came clarity. Fuck him. He’d done this. I needed to get loose. I bit down on the gag as I writhed, but solid walls encased me and the gag stayed where it was. I lay on my side. My elbow thumped painfully into something above me. My bare toes did too at my front. My breathing rasped wetly, bubbling past the thing in my mouth. Just lifting my ribs became a hundred, thousand times more important than anything.
I dragged in air as something rocked whatever coffin it was I occupied. Distant voices. Man? Or more? Men? There seemed two different voices.
My teeth sank into rubber. My tongue tip slipped over the wet roundness.
Ball gag.
The bastard. He kidnapped me. He put it there between my lips. I remembered him, remembered his words.
“I’m going to get into your head right there. Where you can never ever get me out.”
“You’re going to be blind for a few days. When I take this off, you’ll be somewhere far from civilization. There will be no one who can help you. There will only be me.”
I knew where I was. There’d been an engine noise before, long ago. A car. He had me in a car. I slumped. Drowsiness returned and snuggled into my mind. I was hot and tired and breathing meant more to me than getting loose. Breathe. One last kick. Maybe that other man will hear me. Maybe he’ll let me go.
I kicked and nearly broke my toe on timber. But metal creaked and the car rocked again. I listened, ears straining. Waves? Seagulls screeching? Brighter light flared through the tape across my eyes. Someone had turned up the volume on the sound. There were distant voices. Waves. Yes. Was I still on the island?
“Put that down, man. Get out of the car and walk away.”
“The fuck I will. You’ve got a woman tied up in here! What the fuck...is this a scene thing? One of your kinky pretend things?”
“Andreas. You need to leave. Now.”
“Okay. Okay. Sorry. The shit you get up to. Give me a call when you and her have finished fucking your brains out. Or whatever you intend to do.”
Going? He was going? Despite the sogginess permeating my brain, I knew that was bad. I needed to make noise. I tried to speak but only gurgles emerged. I coughed and found liquid clogging my throat where words should have been.
“She’s choking!”
“Fuck. The dose might have been a bit high. Listen. Ignore anything she says.”
Fingers fumbled at my mouth. The thing was pulled from me, leaving my lips feeling bereft without the pressure. I breathed. Deep, cool air. Coughed again. The fog closed in.
Storms ahead. Words of no sense popped up when I needed sense. What was that other word?
“You okay?” Thick fingers brushed my cheek. Gentle.
No. I’m not. I’m not. I’m… “Kidnapped,” I croaked.
“What? What did you say?”
“Andreas. Ignore. You don’t butt in on a scene.”
I swallowed then choked on that word again. “Kidnapped. Please. Need help.” I was blind and my tongue was made of sludge but somewhere in front of me was a man who could save me.
“Chris. What is this? What shit is this? Dose? Even I know you don’t use drugs with BDSM.”
Someone sighed – long and deep. Chris spoke. “Right. Let me explain, Andreas. There are good reasons.”
“Jesus. Reasons?” His voice rose high at the end. A long pause.
“I can explain.”
“She’s... How can you possibly explain this? You’re more than a brother to me, you know that. But this...this had better be good. Like, I mean, better than anything you’ve ever explained...ever.”
Chris chuckled. That alone made the hairs on my neck rise. So wrong.
“I need to make sure she doesn’t call out. Smaller gag. Okay?”
“You want to put a gag back on her?”
Hope kindled. The man sounded doubtful. He’d get the cops now.
“Yes. She can breathe through it.”
Though my tongue seemed disconnected from me, though my temples ached with each thump of my blood, I strained to hear. Andreas’s reply was a long time coming.
“Mate, I can’t see how you’re going to get out of this one.”
“Wait.”
No way. I opened my mouth and sucked in air so I could yell only to have another ball pushed into my mouth. I squirmed and tried to shake my head but a hand held my face. My struggles grew weaker. Too much effort. Too much trouble to fight the cold fog that ate my thoughts, leeched at my muscles.
“Good girl,” I heard whispered from inches away. “Stay there quiet while we talk.”
The whispers repeated. Good girl.
Good? Not me. Not me... Never me. FieryKat. I will fuck you up, boys. Somehow. Just give me time. I will...
Inside me, the black fog spread and swallowed me down.
Chapter Two
Andreas
For once, the view out the windscreen of Chris’s four-wheel drive was dirty. I frowned. In a long wooden box behind these front seats, a woman was...tied up, gagged, and blindfolded. And drugged. While I struggled to cope with that concept, my mind ran off on a tangent.
Dusty windscreen. Chris always had a reason.
Ah. You couldn’t see in, could you? Not easily. He’d probably chucked a bucket of dirt over it.
The man, my friend, sighed and ran a hand through his sun-bleached blond hair. “Do you want me to explain or would you rather I answer your questions? Andreas?”
I shook my head while I stared past his ear. Then I met his eyes. We’d always been honest with each other. “Does it matter? This is insane.”
Through the dusty glass, I could see other people lounging against their cars. As the bow of the ferry carved the waves, sea water sprayed high into the air. A brisk wind rattled the door and went whistling away. Sunlight glinted warmly off metal. Even with the door shut, we had to raise our voices to be heard over the ferry’s engine noise. All...yeah, fucking normal stuff.
I swallowed. Chris just sat there, giving me time. Least he hadn’t pulled out a knife. But was this the same man I knew?
As if to remind me, a dull knocking came from the box. There were air holes and a metal mesh, but if I heard that gurgly breathing again I was freeing her ASAP.
“Fuck it. What are you doing? Go on. Explain.” I glanced at my watch. “This is surreal. You’ve got ten minutes before we reach the harbor.”
“Truthfully, I’d rather you just leave.”
“And forget I saw this?” I thumbed toward the box. “I can’t. Couldn’t. It’s too late for that.” In a moment of clarity, I was glad I’d decided to get into Chris’s four-wheel drive. Whoever it was back there, she needed me.
Again with the sigh. But otherwise Chris regarded me levelly with his sharp blue eyes. Not hostile. We were too close for anything nasty to happen between us.
But I had to do something. “Not tempted to throw me over the side for the sharks?”
“Huh.” Chris glanced down at my arm and the scars throbbed as if the damn thing knew it was getting attention. He shook his head then settled his shoulders back into his door. “No. If you have to go to the cops afterward, I can accept that. Life goes on.”
Christ. The man was always so confident. Not a façade either. Just him. Then his jaw moved as if he were chewing.
Maybe this did bother him? Relief flooded me. I didn’t want to see him as Ice Man. No one normal could brush off abducting someone as casually as if they’d found a new paint color they liked.
“Tell me then. Why?”
“If she gets loose.” He jerked his head toward the back of the car, “A friend is likely to go to jail for ten or more years. What he did was something I would have done, you too maybe. He doesn’t deserve it.”
I blinked, thinking as well as I could. “What did he do?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“You can’t?” And that made it so much easier for me to judge this. “Then why her? What did she do? Did she make this up? This thing your friend did?”
“No. She snooped where she shouldn’t have.”
“Uh.” I sat back. “So you’ve done this to her...something thoroughly illegal and dangerous that might get you in jail for fifty years, let alone ten, because she was nosy?”
Chris rubbed his fingers along the steering wheel. An extra hefty gust of wind shook the vehicle. “Partly that, yes. More that a friend needed help.”
She, obviously, wasn’t his friend.
“So...what are you planning to do with her? You’re not, god forbid, killing her?” I knew the answer would be no, but I had to ask.
“You think I would do that?”
I shook my head. Fuck, I hoped not.
“Of course I wouldn’t.”
“And so instead, like a Good Samaritan,” I waved my hand in a vague circle, “you’re planning to set her up for life with a huge lump of money and a mansion in France?”
He laughed. “Comedian.” Chris glanced back toward the box that held the woman. He leaned over, reached between the seats, and lifted the side of the box, keeping his body mostly in the way in case anyone passing by looked in.
Through the gap between my seat and Chris’s body, I studied the woman. Her face slumped in either sleep or unconsciousness. Wrist cuffs locked her hands down onto a metal ring on the box beside her neck. She was breathing fine. The ball of the gag even had a large hole through the middle.
Youngish. Cherry red hair. So bright it must be fake. The edge of a tatt showed on her shoulder.
I wondered what she would look like without the black ball of the gag. My gaze slipped downward to where her breasts were jammed together by the position. The bunched-up pale blue T-shirt had a few specks of blood and grime on it. The neckline showed the top of her red bra. Pretty. Vulnerable. Pity and an urge to help her vied with a deep curiosity as to what she’d look like naked. That my head even went there bothered me. I pulled my gaze away.
Shit. This was like perving on a victim in an ambulance.
“She’s good. Breathing’s settled.” He lowered the side of the box. Despite his nonchalance, I couldn’t help but notice the absolute fascination he had for her, the last second of hesitation as he closed the side. Like he couldn’t tear his eyes away. “Beautiful, isn’t she?”
How did you answer that? I shrugged. “I’m not going there. You still haven’t said what you’re doing with her.”
A line formed between his eyes. At last I’d stirred him. “I’m not going into details.”
Then he waited again. Shit.
“You expect me to leave her with you based on that?”
“Yes. I never wanted you to get in the car. The less you know the better for you, me and her.”
His chest rose and fell in a regular rhythm – too regular, forced perhaps. Or was I reading in things that weren’t there? I needed a fucking lie detector. Wait, no. He wouldn’t lie to me. Would he?
“Well. Too late, I did get in. I emailed you. Tried to phone...” We always hung out together when I visited the island. “When I saw your car, what else do you think I was going to do? Assume you had a woman tied up in the back and leave you be? I thought we’d go to the pub and have a beer somewhere. Have fun. Go fishing, swimming. Fuck some girls. You know...” I faked a laugh. “Shit, now...” I shook my head vigorously. “What are you doing with her? You have to tell me.”
“I don’t want to pull you into this.”
“You have. You’re my best mate. You saved my goddamned worthless life once or twice. I don’t want to dob you in to the cops. Tell me something. I’m not going to walk away. She was having trouble breathing and you never saw it. You want murder on your conscience? Why? What are you doing with her?” I glanced out at the approaching line of the mainland harbor. “Five minutes left.”
Chris rubbed his finger along his nose for a second. “Okay. Do what you want to. “I’m...” He took a deep breath. “I’m keeping her.”
“What?” Oh shit. I remember a drunken night when we’d all spilled our guts.
What are five things you’d most like to do that are illegal. Then we’d shared. A bunch of teenagers at university having a stupid drunken party. The usual. Until I checked what Chris had written as number one on his list. Kidnap a girl and keep her. At the top of mine, I’d written, keep a girl as my slave.
Funny. But ever since then we’d been one. I’d never forgotten the list. We hadn’t always lived in the same place but when we were together we partied and hung out and had great times. Until now.
“The list,” I murmured, so softly he couldn’t possibly hear.
But his eyes narrowed. “I’m driving to the Daintree area. A business friend has loaned me a house there. Somewhere quiet, away from anyone who might see or hear anything. I’m going to make her mine. Going to train her to obey me.”
Shit. My blood thundered. My cock stood up all on its ownsome. This was so wrong that my head was spinning. “You can’t do that.”
“I can. I am. It’s that or let her go to do so much damage to my friend’s life, and now, to mine. She brought this on herself. Now are you going to open that door and walk away?”
What was I going to do? He was blaming her for this? I wrenched my logical brain into gear. “That’s a six-, seven-hour drive. What if she dies? You can’t watch her breathing. You’re driving straight through?” I deadpanned those words but I was fucking tumbling through rapids in my head.
He nodded, pursed his mouth.
I couldn’t leave her with him, but I didn’t want to be with him either. With her...them. I wiped my mouth. “I’m not leaving her alone with you. I’m not having her death on my conscience. I’m coming with you until we sort everything out.”
“You think I’m going to change my mind? I’m going to let her go? She’d go straight to the police and then everyone is up shit creek without a paddle. If you want that just go to the cops yourself, Andreas.”
“I’m coming with you. This way we can figure out some alternative. And I can make sure she’s not going to choke to death.” I had to convince him to release her. I held up my hands. “I’m between jobs. No one’s going to miss me.”
“I wasn’t going to leave her unsupervised, Andreas.” Chris had a knack for knowing when to stop talking. The ferry was angling toward the jetty, engines throbbing loudly. “But okay.”
“Good.” I settled back into the seat. Once we were on the road, I’d prop open the flap to the box so I could keep an eye on the woman.
I attempted to calm my racing heart but some delayed logic snuck in. The box she was in was no spur of the moment thing. How long had he been planning this?
We were close mates but I knew how kinky Chris was and all about his love of BDSM. He’d let me watch him flog a girl once. Even though I could see she wanted it, that scene had fucked me up for days. While I’d watched I’d been a confused mix of aroused and horrified. I’d also seen the steel mask of concentration on his face. Chris was a sadist through and through.
I’d trust him with my damn life, but with this woman? What he might do to her scared me. There was no way I was leaving him alone with her.
Chapter Three
Chris
We left town with no fuss, the tires purring over the Bruce Highway on our way north. As soon as we were past the outer suburbs, I pointed over my shoulder at the box. Andreas propped open the front. Whenever I glanced sideways, I caught him looking back as if studying her. I wasn’t sure what he made of all this, apart from that obvious disapproval and his desire to keep her safe.
In a way, I was glad he was here to watch her. It was safer for her. I just prayed this wouldn’t backfire on Andreas. And I prayed like hell I could get rid of him fast once we got there. I needed to be alone with her. To sit and figure out what I wanted to do to her.
My fingers were hurting I’d clenched the wheel so tightly. Relax. I’d waited so long, thought about this scenario, off and on, much of my adult life, but...I could wait a bit longer.
No matter how well you know someone, as soon as you break the law, everything goes into a cyclonic blender. What would come out when he’d had time to digest all of this?
I hadn’t seen him for a few months. He’d been out on the oil rig in the Bass Strait same as my brother. Soon we might be going separate ways. His wavy black hair ruffled in the breeze when he wound down the window for a while. From beneath the short ochre sleeve of his T-shirt, the scars from the shark attack ran like pale confetti down the muscles of his left forearm. Remnants of a time when he’d needed me. I liked that. My good friends defined my world.
Andreas was a solid man with a solid conscience. That might prove a problem for him.
Me? I’d stick with my decisions, no matter how wrong they might be in a moral world. But I wasn’t in a moral world, hadn’t been since I was twenty-two and uncle had introduced me to shaky accounting.
I tensed my forearms, using the steering wheel to control my frustration. Of all the people to arrive and fuck this up...to maybe, fuck this up.
But...I made a hard and cutting decision then and there. If Andreas decided to hand me to the police I’d go without protest. I wasn’t jeopardizing things with him. No matter how deep into the dark this kink of mine took me. I could be Mister Evil to her, no worries, because it got me off. Not to him.
“You can take off her gag now,” I said over the engine noise.
He nodded and did so. For a few seconds he held the gag before him like it was some creature he’d caught and he was afraid to let it go in case it bit then he wiped it with his T-shirt and placed it back in the box with her.
“I swear I can hear the thoughts running around in your head. If we get stopped or have to slow down near people, drop the flap back down. If the cops stop us for any reason and they find her, pretend you didn’t know she was there.”
He grunted.
Andreas wasn’t normally the quiet sort but he didn’t say another word until we were near the Mount Spec turn-off.
“I want to stop here. You have to free her, Chris.”
Oh shit.
My stomach was so knotted up I’d probably need a valium myself before the day was out. I could have let this go. I could’ve not told Klaus my idea to take Kat out of the equation. But I had.
I hated that Andreas was here with me. This was my messed-up self. Not his doing. If I could’ve pushed him out the moving car without hurting him, I would have.
For most of my adult years I’d had a distant, back-of-the-cupboard, dangerous yearning to go further than BDSM allowed. Kat... Fuck, her prima donna personality and her pseudo-submissive, emotionally distant behavior had triggered every snarling instinct in me to wrestle her down and impose on her a set of laws that would make her behave. Those little shorts she wore, and the curvaceous body underneath, drove me crazy. I’d been allowed to strip them off her a few times when she agreed to scenes, but that had never been enough.
Being able to mark her with red, to make her scream, to run my hands over her hips and ass and, a few times, to get her off with a vibe or my fingers, if anything that had fed my craving.
Some Doms would have nothing to do with her, but me...I only dreamed of what might be possible.
But I never had, truly, been able to make her behave, because I couldn’t. Hard limits, safe and sane, consensual kink – all those drew lines I couldn’t cross.
“I’m not stopping unless you want to get out and take this to the cops. If you’re doing that, I may as well drive us there. If we stop to chat like schoolgirls on a picnic, the drug will be wearing off. I may have to give her more and that adds to the danger.”
The long, dead-straight road unrolling ahead, for the next kilometer, allowed me to drift my thoughts into remembering how Kat had looked back there. Controlled, for once, waiting for me to decide what to do with her. Her eyes half-closed. It was a miracle I’d wanted so badly for so long.
“Fuckit.” Andreas had shut his eyes. Air hissed in through his teeth. “Fuckit. Fuckit. Fuckit. You’re going to hell, you know.”
I shrugged. “Maybe. You don’t need to be here. I promise I’ll take care of her. I can let you out somewhere and you can catch a bus back. Then you can forget this.”
“What’d you drug her with?”
Ignoring me, hey? “You’re a stubborn bastard when you want to be.” I sneaked a look at his earnest face before concentrating on the road again. “Valium. I researched it, Andreas. Doses, effects. It was the safest one and the easiest to get hold of.”
“It’s hours yet to the Daintree. When does it wear off? What if she starts screaming?”
I kept my voice level. “If I have no choice, I’ll give her more.” I hoped he wouldn’t ask how. The answer would freak him out. “It might take four to six hours to wear off. It might take less. It varies from person to person.”
“Uh-huh.”
Andreas seemed to relax at that – as if knowing I’d planned this well had reassured him. I turned the thought over. His response almost said he didn’t want her to escape. Which was curious. I inhaled and the mind-cracking tension ebbed from my muscles.
“You know this is wrong, don’t you?”
“Yes.” A semi-trailer going the other way rocked our vehicle in its wake and I adjusted my hands on the wheel.
“So you’re not going to shoot anyone if things go ass over turkey?”
“No.” I checked him out. Meditative. “You’re still wondering if you should hand me over to law enforcement?”
“No. Hell, no.”
The road thrummed under the wheels. “Yes, I know it’s wrong. Do I care if society condemns me for doing this? Only if I get caught. Will I hurt anyone over this? No, especially not you. I never thought I’d do this. If the opportunity hadn’t arrived, I’d have kept going the way I was.”
“The way you was?” he murmured. “Just BDSM with chicks who said yes, hey?”
“Yep.”
“I keep thinking I’ve fallen into the wrong wardrobe and come out in Narnia or something. Jabberwocky land. Oz, maybe.”
I pulled a contemplative face and nodded. “Oz is close.”
He bit out a laugh. “You know she’s listening? Doped out, but she is. I can see from the way she holds her head. Does that worry you?”
“Let her.” Kat mightn’t remember much of this. I wasn’t sure of the long-term effects. But if she did... If she did, she’d remember her helplessness; remember us casually talking while she was back there unable to do a thing. I liked that. It gave my balls a warm feeling. I wished I could see her expression.
Yet this wasn’t purely sexual. Even after all these years of being a kinkster, I wasn’t sure what it was that grabbed me about dominating a woman sometimes. It just was me.
Not all sexual, but a part of it. I wanted to see her lips wrapped around my cock even if she didn’t want them there. I took a deep shaky breath.
“The Daintree?” Andreas said it quietly, like it was somewhere interesting and this was a normal holiday chat.
“Yes.”
“I always wanted to go there.”
“Me too.” I turned up the air-con. I didn’t want Kat getting heat stroke. Despite the autumn weather, the box might become a sauna if the tropical sun heated the car.
“We’ll have to stop to get petrol along the way. And I’ll find somewhere isolated, off the road, where we can let her out to go to the toilet. But I’ll have to watch her. To make sure she doesn’t get away.” I eyed him briefly then went back to looking at the road, then back to him again for a moment.
He swallowed and kept his gaze focused ahead. “Okay. When we get there, you and me, we have to talk.”
“Sure.”
I was beginning to wonder what Andreas was thinking about all this. Like any man, he’d have his little fetishes. We all had something dirty we’d like to do, even if we suppressed the ideas. But give us half a chance and a willing...or unwilling victim...most of us would do some damn kinky things to a woman. For some that meant coming on their faces or tearing off their panties and gagging them with them. For others it was ass sex, or milder things. Few men had the guts to let loose the dark beast inside them.
Me, I had a million ideas. Most I’d done at some time, to someone.
Part of Kat’s appeal was the challenge. She’d never submitted to anyone properly. Not that I’d ever seen. Bitch Queen was her true name. She’d never even let me fuck her. I wanted to bring her low, so low she would kiss the dirt for me.
She was going to find out how hard-ass I could truly be when there was nothing stopping me.
Part of it, and just musing on this made that red scintillating need slither through me, part was I just wanted to hurt her and see her take it because she had no choice. Fucked up? Yeah. But it was a beautiful sort of fucked up. I wondered why I always imagined it as a red need? The link to blood probably. Red had a certain distinction to it.
Pain – red.
Fear – black.
Graphic novels followed that sort of color scheme.
Which made sadism a mix of both? There’d be no green though, definitely. Or blue. Screams, in a comic, should be orange. Crap. I was going a bit crazy with this.
Maybe I shouldn’t be imagining what I was planning to do while I was driving?
In those few crystal clear times between us, I was sure I’d seen in Kat a yearning, like she wanted something she couldn’t quite reach. The dominant and submissive relationship, even the malformed one we had shared, let me see things she wanted to hide from everyone. It was a matter of listening hard enough, and paying attention.
In a perverse way, I was sure she wanted someone to make her do what she didn’t want. That was common in submissives, and the Dom’s role is to show them how to let go of control. The difference was that Kat never did let go. She clung to the edge with both hands.
Well, I’d pried away those fingers, and now she was going to learn to fly.
Copyright Cari Silverwood 2013. All rights reserved. No part of these publications may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the author.