The Supplicant Read online

  He wanted her. That was all that was required in their type of arrangement. What he wanted, she gave him, or he had the right to take it from her. It was as simple and as direct and as uncomplicated as that, and that was the way he liked it, dammit.

  Arden had no idea about Loch's conflicting thoughts—nor would she have given a flying fuck even if she had known—nor did she know where they were, although it seemed pretty deserted, and she didn't think they were too far from the coast. They were well off the beaten path—she hadn't seen another house in many miles, and the road they were on was barely more than overgrown dirt tracks. They were in a clearing, but there were trees relatively close around them.

  Loch came around to her again, this time undoing what he'd done earlier and helping her out of the car.

  She thought about protesting, but knew he'd just lift her out of it, anyway, so she got up under her own steam.

  She wanted to ask where the fuck they were, but she also didn't want to talk to him, so stubborn won out over safety concerns, as it often did with her. She wasn't proud of that fact, but there it was.

  As soon as she was standing, he began to divest her of her clothes, and she couldn't help but grab at them—and his hands—compulsively. They were in the middle of a field, for Chrisssakes—only to get her bottom swatted smartly for her efforts.

  Knowing that he wouldn't hesitate to drape her over the hood of the car and make her thoroughly regret her little disobedience, Arden dropped her hands as well as any pretense that she could win against him in this kind of contest, and soon, he had her standing there buck naked.

  And then, after all of this dramatic carrying her out to his car, driving them into the wilderness and relieving her of the safety and comfort of her clothes, he looked down at her and said but one emphatic word, "Run."

  She looked up at him blankly, still seething with at least as much anger—if not more—than she had been when he'd blatantly flaunted the rules of their agreement and pulled her out of the safe zone of her studio and into his territory using his brute strength.

  "The fuck?"

  He knew she was still royally pissed at him—it was in every less than subtle nuance, her facial expression and all of her other body language, not to mention her distinctly sarcastic tone of voice.

  To emphasize his command, he reached out and grabbed a nipple between the thumb and forefinger of each of his hands, wrenching them painfully until she was gasping and up on her tiptoes, trying to avoid the pain he was inflicting on her.

  "I don't think I could make it any plainer." Bearing down on her and being deliberately intimidating, Loch repeated in a raw, savage whisper, "Run. Run like, if you don't, I'm going to use the leather belt you know I have curled up in the trunk on your bare ass with every bit of my strength before I tie you to a tree and fuck so hard the bark shreds your back!" By the last few words, he was screaming at her. Or he would have been if she had still been there.

  But she was off as if the devil himself was chasing her.

  Although he wasn't—yet.

  He watched her as she streaked away from him, his cock already straining insistently against his shorts at the sight of her. He wasn't much of one for head starts, but Arden was just about as far from an athlete as one person could possibly get, and he ran daily for the fun of it. And he wanted to chase her. His blood was already up—as it always was around her—but that very titillating idea sent it rocketing that much further skyward.

  He guessed he was a caveman at heart, but the idea of physically chasing—and, of course, inevitably catching a female, and, he grudgingly admitted to himself, her, in particular, was positively irresistible, and he didn't want it to end too soon.

  For a moment, he debated about whether or not to strip off, himself, but he decided against it, even though the scales were already weighted heavily in his favor. He liked emphasizing her vulnerability to him, and that was just another way—and a delightfully visual one—to do it.

  When Loch set off, he was really just casually loping after her, not even trying very hard to find her. There were signs everywhere in this relatively pristine forest of where she'd gone barreling willy-nilly through it, and he was relatively familiar with the area, so he knew it wasn't going to be hard to find her.

  He was in no hurry. Until he realized that it had been a while since he'd seen any hint of her, but then he hadn't been paying attention to the evidence of her presence any more as he'd walked on, figuring she'd get tired and he'd see her—or hear her—eventually.

  But he hadn't.

  She might not have been an athlete or a person who was particularly comfortable in the woods, but she wasn't making it easy on him, either.

  The smile the settled over his lips was distinctly feral, and, at that moment, so was he.

  He started paying much closer attention to the signs she'd left, because, although she was obviously being less haphazard and more careful about what she did so as to avoid leaving a trail, he was a reasonably good tracker. There was a broken branch here and a part of a footstep in a bit of mud there. He was on her trail.

  Arden had run as far as she could away from him, at first, his occasional scolding of her about not being in better shape physically playing annoyingly in the back of her mind and just making her even angrier at him than she already was. So, she slowed down. At first, because she had to, but then, because she wanted to, to try to avoid detection as long as possible, because she had a horrible feeling that what he'd describe doing to her if she hadn't run from him when he commanded her to wasn't too far off from what he was going to do to her when he finally caught her, and she was extremely interested in delaying that moment for as long as possible.

  The one thing she remembered from all of those historical documentaries her father liked to watch was that when someone was being hunted down, they would try to get to water, where the dogs couldn't scent them and where they would leave no tracks.

  As it happened, she found a small stream that got rapidly bigger, so much so that she felt she needed to get out of it, lest she be swept away by the current, which was, she suspected, headed for an ocean inlet. But it gave her a bit of leeway she hadn't had and allowed her to last much longer out there without being found than she would have thought she could.

  That path led to folly, though. She hadn't heard or seen anything of him since she'd left him, and she was feeling pretty good—feeling pretty proud of herself about her ability to evade him—at least until she reached a small clearing, and she literally blew her cover, all at once, violently.

  "Wahhh-choo!"

  His answering deep, throaty chuckle—that originated almost immediately from an alarmingly short way behind her—was like some sort of weird mating call.

  Damn her goddamn fucking allergies!

  Arden whirled around, towards what she thought was the direction of his derisive laughter, but there was nothing there.

  But before she knew it, he had tackled her—although in a manner that bespoke that he was tempering his considerable strength—literally lifting her over the shoulder he had dropped, as if she was an opposing team's football player and not stopping until he dragged her off it again and used his body to hold her—none too gently—against the broad trunk of a large, old oak tree.

  His hair had leaves and twigs sticking out of it in all directions, his face and clothes were dirty and he was wearing a grin the likes of which she'd never seen before on him—or anyone—that was a potent combination of savage triumph mingled with equal parts savage hunger.

  Her hands were trapped together in one of his and pinned above her head even before she had a chance to recover her breath and begin to fight him, a broad knee was shoved rudely between her legs, prying them open despite how hard she was trying to keep them clamped shut, showing her in a humiliatingly short skirmish that drove home just how silly it was for her to resist him, especially when a second knee joined it and she was splayed open for him.

  "No!" she shrieked when she s
aw him reach for his zipper, trying to jerk and wiggle and scrunch herself away from him, but not only did she not manage to move herself so much as an inch, but all of her mindless movements only served to scratch her own back up!

  Still, she fought as best she could, which proved to be embarrassingly little, and she screamed in rage when she heard him chuckle condescendingly at her again as he nestled the big head of his cock against her entrance before snapping his hips forward and occupying her body fully and completely with his in one mighty thrust.

  The only defense she had left was to simply surrender, to go limp and not react to what he was doing to her in any way.

  It drove him crazy when she did that in even the smallest way—he could always tell, even from the first—when she withheld herself from him, and he had rapidly become an expert in forcing her past that blasé attitude she strived to affect. And this time was no different.

  She saw his eyes narrow and his chin lower, and she knew he was onto her.

  The brutal pounding he gave her wasn't nearly the worst thing that happened once he caught her. The worst thing, as far as Arden was concerned, was that he very quickly and easily found a way—using his fingers and his lips and his tongue in a much less elegant manner than usual, which only added to her rapidly unfettered responses—to dismantle what had been her last line of defense against him.

  And before he allowed himself to finish, he made damned good and sure that he heard her begging him in an almost heartbreaking manner before each powerful, animalistic climax he drove her to—not to make her do it.

  Only when he couldn't physically hold himself back any longer—when he knew he'd already sated her practically into oblivion—did he release the tight hold he'd had on himself to plunge himself home within her once, twice, three more times before his bellow of completion echoed through the woods, startling a flock of grouse into a short, squawking flight as he jerked and growled crudely against her.

  For long moments afterwards, their haggard breath panted out onto each other. Loch continued to hold her captive there, hands still captured together above her, her small body lying limply against his such that, if he moved away, she would simply fall to the forest floor in a heap.

  He couldn't have that, of course. He might not believe in the more tender emotions that everyone else seemed to subscribe to between a man and a woman, but he wasn't an uncaring lout. Then he had to laugh at himself, considering this situation he found himself in at the moment. Well, not usually. And less so with her than most.

  Which was yet another thought that annoyed him. He liked to think that he'd treated all of his women reasonably well, if not lovingly, one no better than the other, preferably.

  And so, he forced himself to let her go—when the beast in him wanted to keep her there so that he could rut on her savagely until she was well-bred—

  What the hell was happening to him?

  Loch willed himself to stop thinking entirely and just do what he knew needed to be done. It was a method of behavior that had always served him well in the past. So, he let her arms down and caught her to him, lifting her against him and carrying her out of the woods to his car.

  To his surprise, she didn't utter one peep of protest. She was apparently much too exhausted to do so, which made him swell with a kind of deep pride he'd never experienced before.

  He stood her so that she could lean against the car while he dressed her, tsking over the condition of her back, as well as the many other scratches and bug bites that covered her. This had certainly been a fun outing, but he wasn't sure it was worth it, considering her condition, although she wasn't fussing about it—he was the only one fussing.

  It was another quiet ride—home, this time—where he helped her out of the car and put the both of them into his enormous tub, where he wanted to make sure all of her scrapes and cuts were carefully cleaned. Then he dried her off and applied antibiotic ointment to the worst of her war wounds and anti-itch cream to the bites.

  Through it all, she remained silent, but he could see that she was just about asleep, even standing up, so he tucked her into bed, kissed her forehead on impulse and told her to go to sleep.

  Without a word, she turned over, and in seconds, he could tell that she had done just that.

  For his part, he stood there, looking down at her for the longest time before forcing himself to turn away from her and head to his study where there was work to be done.

  There was always work to be done, and as he sat behind his big desk with a big whiskey in hand, staring at it all, and having the novel—if unfamiliar and highly annoying—sensation of having to fight with himself not to go join her in that big, warm bed, even if he wasn't tired, but just for the unusual reason that he simply wanted—no, needed, he corrected himself with ruthless honesty—to hold her close to him.

  Which was, to him, an unholy desire that sent a chill up his spine and set his heart to hardening—and aching unbearably—in his chest.

  Chapter 8

  It was the last night he would have her at his command, the last night he could expect her to submit to him, and he had a surprise for her.

  During their time together, he had kept her selfishly, greedily to himself. The idea that she had spent at least seventy-five percent of that time fully naked and probably seventy percent of it writhing in either ecstasy or agony at his behest was no exaggeration. He had never allowed them to venture out except to his back yard, where he had once lay down on the grass, on his back, and bade her to ride him, her hair down, the breeze blowing it back a bit as she did so, breasts and bottom marked and heat from the latter against his loins adding to the indescribable paradise of what she was doing.

  And that one time, as well, when he'd known she needed to get out of her own head and concentrate on something else for a while, when he'd pursued her through the woods on a plot of land that reached its rocky finger out into the water, bordered by the ocean on three sides. He'd bought it for a song on a rare whim, having no idea what he was going to do with it besides hold onto it as some sort of fulfillment of a dream that he had once had as a young boy of owning a house by the ocean, although he had yet found the right occasion to build on it.

  He smiled, remembering how angry she had still been at him for his high handedness before he'd brought her there, even when she'd awakened after he had put her to bed, so much so that when he'd heard her puttering in the kitchen, hours later, he had stood in the doorway, just watching her, unobserved, as she set about making herself a snack.

  Finally, when he could endure torturing himself no longer, he intoned, "Come here."

  Arden turned at the sound of his voice, her eyes flying to his, and he could see there that he was not, in any way, forgiven, as yet.

  In fact, she put her bag of popcorn down and her hands landed on her hips defiantly. "I am not coming to you—I'm pissed at you. You know that, and you know why I'm pissed at you, too."

  Instead of becoming angry with her, his stance actually eased. Loch crossed his arms across his chest and leaned against the door jamb as if he hadn't a care in the world. But the air around them had already become charged with electricity. It was never not, to him, around her.

  "Whether or not you're angry with me, my dear, when I tell you to come to me, I expect you to obey me."

  The little minx actually chortled in amusement at him. "Good luck with that," Arden replied breezily, and with more bravado than she felt. It was all well and good for her to be mad at him, and she had every right to be—he was at fault! But right or not, she knew she had no power in this situation but what little he allowed her.

  He wielded it all, usually across her rapidly roasting backside.

  His silence made her nervous, so she babbled on, saying the obvious. "I'm not mad about the scrapes and scratches and the bug bites, or even the fact that you had me running naked through a forest where anyone could have come upon me—"

  He interrupted with, "I own that lot and all the land around it for miles,
and I was the only person that was going to…come upon you."

  She frowned at his juvenile word play. "Well, you didn't see fit to impart that pertinent bit of information to me before you threatened me until I ran away from you, did you? So I had no idea that I could consider myself to be relatively safe."

  He looked surprised and almost wounded. "Did you think I would have let you loose like that if there was any chance that you would be in any kind of danger?"

  Her blithe shrug irked him more than the fact that she had still yet to obey him. "I'm mad—as if you didn't know—that you blithely used your superior strength to violate my space."

  Loch didn't usually find himself on the defensive. "You said it, yourself, you were stuck. You weren't being inspired. Your artistic talent comes from what I would imagine to be a very deep, primal place within you, but you couldn't tap it. I brought you to a deep, primal place and forced you to get in touch with your more animalistic side, hoping it might help."

  She tsked at him. "Please. You wanted to chase me and then, once you'd inevitably caught me, you wanted to fuck me. But you could have done that later—you didn't have to come into my studio—where I'm supposed to feel and be safe—and drag me out, quite literally kicking and screaming. It was a violation of my trust, Loch. A big one. If a sub can't trust her dom to respect her limits—the ones he agreed to—legally, even…" She shook her head, then suddenly threw away the full bag of popcorn, putting away the box and heading out of the kitchen and down the hall.

  "Where are you going?" He frowned, chasing after her in a way that was nowhere near as fun as the other kind had been.

  "I'm taking a sick day." She coughed once, loudly and artificially, then set about putting her clothes on.

  Loch ran his hand through his hair, feeling himself rapidly losing control of the situation as she pulled on panties and jeans.