“You haven’t really answered the question, though,” I prodded, finally breaking free of my paralysis. I crossed to the bed and sank down on the edge, half facing him. Because I could, I placed a hand over his silent heart—where a shotgun blast had torn through the smooth flesh mere days ago—holding it there for a moment before running it down the hard ridges of his stomach. “What do you like?”
It was like caressing a statue... or it would have been if his cock hadn’t twitched against his belly. Blue eyes held mine.
“Oh, I could fill a century or three with all the things I want to do to you, my little vixen,” he said. “But honestly, I’ve found that what you do in bed is far less important than who you’re doing it with.”
My breath caught. Not fair, damn it. He shouldn’t be allowed to make my heart and my sex ache at the same time. That was playing dirty.
“Don’t say things like that,” I whispered, my hand still splayed low on his abdomen.
There was a moment’s silence. “You really don’t do well with kindness, do you, Zorah?” he observed. Then he raised a challenging eyebrow. “Fair enough. If you don’t want to hear it, then come here and shut me up.”
That sounded like a plan I could get behind. I leaned forward, closing the distance until I could kiss him at the same time I slid my hand down the final few inches to encircle his erection. My eyes slid closed as the sensation of something flowing out of him and into me returned. He let me ravish his mouth and cock for a few minutes, drawing what I needed from him.
Then his hands closed on my shoulders and his body twisted under me. Before I was aware of what was happening, I was on my back beneath him, caged by his hard body as his weight pressed me into the soft mattress. His mouth grew demanding on mine, and something inside me loosened, settling warmly into place.
Eventually, the feeling of drowning in him grew too intense, forcing me to wrench my lips free of his so I could gasp in air. “This,” I panted. “I want this. I want you to make me lose control.”
If I could help him turn everything off for a while, maybe he could do the same for me. Now that I was sober, real life threatened to come crashing down on me again—all the fears, all the worries, all the problems and mysteries I couldn’t do anything about until daylight returned. Rans’ remark about the neighbors not being able to hear me scream replayed in my mind, making me shiver with anticipation regarding the kinds of things he might do to me if given free rein.
He held himself above me on hard-muscled arms. Beyond the window, clouds sculled across the moon, dimming its light and blurring the details of his features into grayness broken only by the shining blue of his eyes.
“Hmm,” he mused. “Let me see, now. A freshly unearthed voyeurism kink and a desire to lose control. You know, I don’t care that you were draining their life force. Your exes were barmy not to stick around longer, luv.”
I wrinkled my nose at him, not sure if he could see the expression in the deeper darkness that had overtaken the room. The huff of low laughter seemed to indicate that he could.
“Don’t move a muscle,” he warned. “I just need to grab something. Back in a tick.”
With that, he kissed me quickly on the lips and rolled off the bed. I lay still, heart pounding with anticipation. As promised, he took only a moment.
“What is it?” I asked breathlessly, unable to make out detail now that the moon was hidden behind clouds.
The lamp switch clicked, casting a circle of warm light outward from the bedside table. It threw the planes of Rans’ body into gold-limned dips and shadows, distracting me for a moment from the object dangling from his hand—a braided leather belt, the free end threaded through the buckle to form a small loop at the bottom.
“Give me your wrists, Zorah.”
I didn’t even think before I extended my wrists, feeling blood thrumming through every vein as my heart galloped wildly. Rans gathered my hands together, pressing his lips to the knuckles of first one, and then the other. He slipped the loop over them and tugged it closed, pressing my palms together as if in prayer. Leaning forward, he drew my arms over my head and tied the loose tail of the belt around one of the spindles in the headboard.
When he was done, he straightened and looked down at me with a serious expression. “The buckle isn’t clasped,” he said. “You can pull and struggle against it as much as you like, and it should hold, but if you really want to get loose, all you need to do is press your wrists apart to open up the loop so you can slide your hands out. Try it.”
I tugged against the belt, first lightly, then harder until I could feel the soft leather biting into my wrists. Then I relaxed and wriggled my hands back and forth, feeling the loop widen as the buckle slid along the leather. I nodded, confident that I could easily slip my hands free if I needed to.
“And if you don’t like something?” he asked, still regarding me seriously.
“I’ll tell you to stop,” I said in a breathy voice.
He smiled, letting his gaze slide down the length of my body like a
