Caged Read online

  So she opted for his other arm first.

  It wasn’t the first or last time she’d be seriously wrong.

  Almost the second she had begun trying to secure his hugely thick wrist, with parts of her body hanging over him in a very unladylike position, she knew she’d miscalculated.

  In the silence of the small room, she heard the gun being cocked before she felt it pressed—not to her side, not even to her chin—but to her temple.

  “Just what in the Sam Hill do you think you’re doing there?”

  And there was no viable explanation she could give him. What he thought she was doing was exactly what she was doing, so Rachel didn’t say a thing.

  After a long, torturous silence, he ordered, “Untie me, then give me the ropes and lie down on the bed beside me, against the wall.”

  Her eyes widened in alarm, but it wasn’t as if she had any choice. Very few seconds later he was in possession of the same lengths of hemp that she was going to use to tie him up, and she fully expected that he was going to do the same thing to her, once she complied with his order for her to take her place beside him. With that enormously dangerous gun trained on her the entire time, her mouth dry as the ever blowing wind outside, Rachel carefully, gingerly did as she was told to do, cramming herself into the small space between the mountain of flesh that was him and the wall of her cabin.

  She couldn’t possibly have been more shocked at what he said next.

  “Strip.”

  It was the first time she’d really tried to look him in the eye. “What?” she asked automatically, knowing she sounded like an idiot. There was no way she couldn’t have heard his low, firm command.

  The gun poked painfully into her side.

  “All of your clothes—even your skivvies. Take them off and hand them to me.” When she hesitated, he reached over and grabbed her chin in his hand. “Now.”

  There was no stopping the tears anymore, try as she might and she did. They poured down her cheeks as she did as he commanded, however reluctantly. Her motions slowed as the pile of her clothing where she’d begun laying it on his stomach grew. Soon, she was down to just her thin, threadbare shift, bloomers and stockings.

  “Please,” she whispered, horrified that she’d been so effortlessly reduced to begging, “please let me keep the rest of my clothes on. I promise I’ll–”

  “Don’t make promises you can’t keep. You’d do anything to get away from me, and I intend to see that you’ll think twice and then think again before you decide to do something stupid.”

  He put his big paw out. Her stockings landed there first, then her bloomers, and, when she could delay it no longer, she sat up enough to tug her shift over her head, placing that into his hand, too. Her fingers clung to it and he pried them away as he tucked her clothing beneath him for the moment, and then turned back to her.

  As fuzzy headed as he was, Cage still thought had never seen a more beautiful woman in his life, and he’d seen quite a few of them. Her skin was like fine bone china, so fair it was almost translucent, like a baby’s. Her hair was yellow gold and scraped back into a bun that had—by dint of what she’d had to do for him—begun to loosen and he could see by the straggly hanks that it wasn’t curly but definitely wavy. He wanted to wrap it around his hand as he took her, hard. Her eyes were a bright, intelligent blue. She was a tiny woman, something that had always appealed to him, usually bringing out his protective instincts, but in this situation he forced himself to set those highly ingrained feelings aside.

  He preferred to live rather than to worry about offending or even—he was ashamed to admit—hurting her, so he allowed himself to imitate his bastard of a grandfather, which had ended up being much easier than he would have liked.

  She was afraid of him and that was what he had to want. Her hands were desperately trying to hide her nakedness from him, but he pried first one then the other away from her body, resolutely using one of the hemp lengths to bind her wrists together while she wept pitifully, and then, as she tried to fight him for all she was worth, he brought them above her head and secured them there to the wooden bed frame.

  Afterwards she lay trembling next to him, practically shaking the bed in fear, weeping softly, and all he wanted to do was to comfort her. In the condition he was in, that was about all he could do—although he wasn’t about to tell her that.

  Unable to prevent himself from doing so, he reached down and pulled the coverlet out from under her, covering those perfect, mauve tipped mounds and the light, golden fleece that covered her womanliness, calling himself all kinds of fool for having done so even as he did it.

  Chapter Two

  He remained turned towards her and did his best to try to stay awake, but he just couldn’t. At least he didn’t have to worry about her killing him in his sleep, or leaving to get help or any other such nonsense as she was likely to get up to without his watchful eye on her.

  Rachel couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t seem to do anything but cry now that the floodgates had opened. Things had turned out almost as badly as she’d expected they would. He hadn’t tried to do anything horrible to her now that he had her in such a vulnerable position, but she knew it was just a matter of time.

  He fell asleep next to her and she knew she should relax so that she could think, but she simply couldn’t turn her mind to a solution. Instead, she spent all of her time reliving the nightmare of what had happened to her prior to ending up where she was, and it seemed that, in desperately trying to avoid a fate worse than death, she had jumped from the frying pan into the fire. Whether it was by a member of the social elite to whom her father had given her or a dirty, dangerous gunman, it didn’t seem to her that it made much difference in the end.

  Defiled was defiled as far as she—and the rest of society—was concerned.

  Mr. Hemmingway hadn’t quite gotten to that point with her. He’d been dragging it out, torturing her for his own amusement and thoroughly enjoying her terror at his actions. Rachel couldn’t imagine that the man lying next to her would treat her any better; it was much more likely to be a thousand times worse.

  Why hadn’t she just seized his gun and used it to put herself out of her own misery? Her cowardice had only just bought her a much-shortened lifetime of horrendous pain and mortification, she was quite sure.

  The increasing agony in his side woke Cage with a start some time later; he had no idea how long he’d been asleep, but he sensed all of a sudden that something was off.

  The girl was sitting up—which she shouldn’t have been able to do— and leaning against the wall, with the quilt wrapped around her like a toga. She was still next to him, although the gun was not.

  He didn’t have to wonder where it had gotten to, though, because it was being held in her trembling hands, aimed directly at his heart.

  How had she gotten loose? He’d made sure that the bonds were tight enough to hold her in place, but not so tight as to cut off the circulation to her hands. Was he going to pay with his life for being that faint hearted an outlaw?

  As if he couldn’t feel one bit of the agony that was coursing through him, he quickly sat up, which immediately gave him a height advantage, although the muzzle of that gun followed him unerringly—if unsteadily. Damn, that thing had a hair trigger. If she wasn’t careful, she’d kill him accidentally on purpose.

  She was still weeping; he wondered if she’d been crying the entire time he’d been asleep, or unconscious, or whatever it was that he’d been.

  He knew instinctively that the best thing he could do—until he could find a way to disarm her without getting himself killed—was to talk to her. Many of his lovers had complimented him on his voice. They found it either soothing or arousing, or both, it seemed. He figured one or the other ought to work on her; he didn’t much care which.

  “You don’t want to do that, lady.”

  “My name is Mrs. Hemmingway.” A thought struck her, and a lie fell easily from her lips. “And my husband will be back fro
m hunting any minute.”

  He let himself almost but not quite smile at her vehemence, but he also noticed that she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring and his knowing smile easily conveyed the fact that he knew that she was lying about having a husband. A lot of women who had made what society considered to be grave errors in judgment came out west to start anew, and he figured that some version of that was probably her story.

  He highly doubted Mr. Hemmingway existed, and if he did, he was probably somewhere back in the East. Either way, it wasn’t something he was going to worry about.

  “You don’t want to do that, Missus,” he repeated, using the soft, cajoling tone he’d used with his little sister when she’d gotten some sort of hair brained idea stuck in her stubborn little head. “Why, if you kill me, you’ll go to Hell.”

  “I don’t care.”

  The gun didn’t waver. If anything, it steadied.

  Apparently that was the wrong tack to take. “Then, if nothing else, think of the terrible mess all over your fine house.”

  The stunned look at his use of humor was just what he was going for as he reached for the gun, but she halted his hand mid-grab by simply turning the muzzle of the gun towards herself instead, and Cage felt his heart drop onto the floor.

  He much preferred that she keep it trained on him than point it at herself.

  “Hey now, that’s not funny, Missus.”

  “It’s not meant to be funny.” The dead calm of her words worried him more than anything else that had gone on between them. He’d heard that tone of voice before from badly injured or cowardly soldiers in the War and nothing good had ever come of it.

  Once he’d made up his mind what he was going to do, he did it without hesitation. He threw the little knife he’d found under the sheet—obviously what she’d used to cut herself loose and long since forgotten by her—against the far wall of the cabin, distracting her just enough that he was able to grab the gun and wrestle it away from her.

  But not before it discharged once, putting a hole into the dirt floor and kicking up a cloud of it in its wake.

  She had been going to kill herself! She’d been seconds from actually doing it! He couldn’t even begin to come to grips with that, so he didn’t try to. Instead he gave his instincts full reign. He tackled her and wrenched the quilt away from her, leaving her fully nude to his eager gaze.

  Then he reached to the nightstand for another of the hemp ropes and used it to bind her again, only this time he didn’t allow his more tender side to prevail. He tied her well and tight as she tried to fight him, but he ruthlessly quelled her attempts with his superior strength, until she was quite completely trussed up.

  Then he flung her onto her stomach and threw one leg over her thighs, sitting on them just above her knees and he brought both hands down on her unprotected behind at once. She screamed from the very first contact and he couldn’t blame her in the least as he brought his broad, flat palms down again and again onto what had been her pristine white hillocks.

  But they weren’t pristine any longer after the first few, full strength smacks.

  Rachel didn’t think she could take much more of this. She’d never been spanked in her life and she was glad of it, considering that now that it was happening to her for the first time she thought she was going to die. It was horrendous! It felt as if he was touching a torch to her behind every time those huge hands of his slapped down on her and he didn’t seem to be interested in stopping any time soon.

  And when he did, it was only to make things worse as she heard him unbuckle his belt.

  “No, please, don’t!” She had made a promise to herself that no man would ever make her beg again, and yet he had managed to make her break that promise several times already. She hated being weak. Why had she hesitated when she’d finally cut her way through the ropes that held her wrist using the knife she kept secreted in the feather mattress? Why hadn’t she just shot him dead then and there?

  In answer to her plea, as she continued to hear signs that he was removing that leather strap from around his waist, he said, “I will do whatever I think necessary in order to dissuade you from ever, ever thinking of doing something like that. You were going to kill yourself, and that is never a acceptable, no matter what.”

  Rachel had no idea why it seemed to be so important to him that she—a veritable stranger to him—not kill herself, but he seemed quite intend on making sure she didn’t.

  And then he’d proceeded to prove to her that she’d been right all along. It could get so much worse than what Hemmingway had done to her. She’d never screamed in agony as a line of fire was lit across her behind before, but she did now. She’d never rubbed her wrists raw trying to escape the man she thought had treated her the worst in her life, but she did now. She’d never been held down as someone mercilessly bit into her tender flesh with his belt, but she had now.

  And, afterwards, when he was calmly replacing the implement of her misery around his waist, she found herself sobbing, this time in much like the same abject anguish that was frighteningly familiar from her unfortunate time with the disturbing—and disturbed—Mr. Hemmingway.

  Cage knew he’d gone a bit far in punishing her—although, in his own defense, he’d seen entirely too much death for him to blithely ignore what she’d apparently been quite intent on doing. He didn’t know why, but the hopelessness of her sobs was getting to him even more than her much louder, more strident cries for mercy had a few moments ago as he’d brought his belt down to bite into her backside. He stretched back out beside her and rolled her—forcibly, because that was how she made him do it, struggling against him all the way—onto her back as she gasped and arched up against the touch of the rough sheet on what was left of her behind, raw and sore as every inch of it was. Then, he tied her hands again above her head to the bedframe.

  Tears poured down her cheeks, and at that moment, he gave in to the side of him that he’d been trying to hold at bay—the one that wanted to comfort her, to hold her and tell her that everything would be all right as long as she obeyed him, the one that he was so wary of because it wanted much, much more than that from her; it wanted to take comfort in and from her, too.

  It would be a challenge, especially since he’d just blistered her, but then he’d always loved challenges.

  He loved winning them most of all, he thought, kicking his boots off so that they thudded to the floor off the end of the bed.

  Rachel had forced herself to gradually allow her bottom to come in contact with the bed, as much as it hurt, simply because she couldn’t maintain that arched position for very long anyway. When his hand came to rest on her tummy, about halfway between her breasts and other parts of her person that she did not want him to come in contact with even more than her bare stomach, she began to try to drive her bottom through the bed and down onto the floor in order to get out from under his touch. Any amount of discomfort would be worth it if she could avoid being molested again.

  It didn’t work. Nothing did. When she tried to wiggled closer to the wall, not only did his hand follow her, but he also casually draped one of those enormous thighs over her, and when he found he couldn’t quite manage to put it between her legs, his hand drifted down to pry her thighs apart, returning to its spot on her tummy as soon as he was able to wrap a leg around the closest one of hers and clench his thighs, forcing hers inexorably apart as he brought his leg around it.

  Rachel was certain that the nightmare was beginning again and her wails reached a true fever pitch, especially when she glanced down and saw one of his big paws reaching for her breasts.

  “Please don’t hurt me!” As much as she tried to stifle that pitiful plea, it escaped through her lips anyway.

  Her eyes were wide as saucers, her body taut, as if she expected that he was going to rip her tit off or something, when nothing could have been further from his mind. It had always been so apparent to him, even with his first woman, that it was a better experience overall if the woman were a
t least somewhat ready for him. He’d learned—with some very eager partners who were everything from whores to society ladies—how to make that happen for them, even if some women didn’t seem to be able to enjoy it quite as much as others.

  He was hoping this Missus was one of the ones that could allow herself to feel the fullest extent of her pleasure—he was certainly going to try to make sure that she did, although, considering her reaction it was going to be just that much harder to do.

  If he allowed himself to think about her terrified reaction—and he wasn’t going to do that—his first reaction was to want to do great bodily harm to whoever it was that had made her so frightened, whoever had obviously hurt her, even though he had just lit viciously into her backside not more than ten minutes ago. But he’d had a very good reason—he hadn’t just been doing it for his own amusement—not that it hadn’t made him hard, it had. But there was more to it for him. He would have bet everything he owned—which, granted didn’t appear to be much at the moment—that there had been no such altruistic motives for the man whose name was probably Mr. Hemmingway.

  Instead of soothing her as he might have if their circumstances had been different, he simply set about showing her that he wasn’t going to hurt her by very gently plucking at nipples that were far from the hardened peaks he was used to seeing, although after he very carefully tended to them and coaxed them out, they stood as high and proud as he could have wished.

  And the little Missus was no longer crying. Her eyes were still wide and edged with fear as she continued to pant nervously, and she still tried to shrink away from his touch, but he could see the changes beginning already, although he knew she wasn’t going to like that she liked it.

  And he adored that dichotomy in a woman, especially when he could drive her past her natural resistance.

  He wondered what she would be like in her pleasure. Would she barely move, just close her eyes and sigh, letting him do what he wanted and mentally wishing she were somewhere else? Or would she buck her hips up against his hand—or his mouth—he hadn’t decided which one yet — and cry her pleasure to the Heavens, perhaps even shouting his name, as some women had in his sensual embrace?