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Palming the back of my head, he forces me down on the table. “Oh no you don’t. I say when to breathe. Not you.”
He leans down over me, bracing on his left elbow with his forearm across my shoulders. It takes me a second to realize he has another knife in his right hand. Once he has my attention, he presses the flat of the blade against my throat. My heart pounds and I can imagine my blood rushing to his cold steel, eager to do his bidding.
His breathing rasps in my ear, and he draws the blade down to the top of my right shoulder. “This is safer. I don’t quite trust myself to have a knife to that lovely throat while I’m fucking you.”
“You, safe?”
He chuckles heavily and pulls my head toward his shoulder so I can feel the tightening cotton on my windpipe. He doesn’t have to hold me there—I keep my head back as far as he’ll allow. I can still breathe, but with a corset on my throat instead of my chest. Widening his stance to get a better angle, he thrusts again, deep and hard. His weight against my hips, pressing my stomach down on the unforgiving table, combined with the strip around my throat.
Lightheaded, I sink into bliss. I’ve been in subspace before, but not like this. Not so completely. He has the ability to shut off my brain so I’m all body, all his, merely an extension of his will. In all the scenes I’ve done with other partners, I’ve never been so completely taken, so fulfilled and yet so owned, so thoroughly enslaved, at the same time.
The blade bites into the top of my right shoulder and his mouth clamps over the wound. Thrusting savagely, he drives me higher, gray fading to brilliant white and then edging toward blackness. There, I hear a rumbling roar and he convulses against me. His hands squeeze and I flow through his fingertips like wet sand.
I’m gone for a while. My cheek is on the cold table. He reaches over me to jerk the cotton free of the knives, his other hand at my throat loosening the cotton.
“Ranay,” he whispers urgently. “Are you okay?”
I push off the table, trusting him to catch me. He swings me up against him and I bury my face against his neck. I don’t try to talk. He can feel how okay I am. How perfect. Words aren’t necessary, and talking is more than I can manage right now.
He carries me to the bathroom, sitting on the toilet with me cradled in his lap until the tub is full of steaming hot water. His hands, so large and powerful and violent, now incredibly tender. He loosens the ties and strokes the red marks where I twisted my hands and fought to get my legs apart. His hands tremble as he strokes the small cuts he put in my skin.
I force my heavy eyes open. “I want…” I have to pause a moment, waiting for my mouth and brain to work together again. “To see. The two.”
He shifts me in his lap, twisting my right hip up so I can see where he cut me. These marks are heavier than the first ones he did on my breast. In fact, part of the wound’s still oozing blood.
Lifting me up effortlessly, he presses that cut to his mouth and licks the blood away.
Watching him, I can only smile that I gave him what he needs. It doesn’t disgust me. It can’t. If the Master needs it, I give. Without question.
Gently, he sets me into the tub, holding me up so I don’t slide beneath the water. I would have, without him. I would sink beneath the surface and drift away to sea.
I fight up through the billowing waves of sleep as he tucks me into bed and wraps himself around my back, drawing me into his heat. He turns his head, pushing beneath my still-damp hair to find my ear.
“Sleep awhile. Then we’ll devour the food you made.”
“On the table,” I whisper, unable to get much volume in my voice.
He smiles against my ear. “Yes, we’ll eat at the table. After I wipe it down first.”
“Don’t—” I want to tell him not to fix the holes in the tabletop from where he thrust his knives, but it’s too many words to string together at once.
“I won’t,” he assures. “That table is scarred forever, as my mark is now on you. Sheba’s here, so I’m going to clean up.”
“Not yet,” I mumble, unable to stay awake. “Hold me.”
Sadness settles over him like a heavy blanket. “As long as I can, kitten. As long as I can.”
25
Sweating and sore, I wave my hand at him and bend over to catch my breath. “Maybe I should borrow some running shoes after all.” He isn’t even breathing hard, though sweat glistens on his bare chest. Even with a large bandage covering a three-inch-long gash in his side barely held together with staples. “Did we work off all that cheesecake yet?”
“I thought running was a hard limit.” He smiles faintly. “You’re doing well. I think you’re ready for the next step.”
We’ve been practicing my self-defense skills all day. My muscles are sore from yesterday’s scene, but he’s adamant. No lounging in front of the fireplace while the wind howls and snow piles up outside, not while we have work to do.
So far, we’ve only been using our bodies. I figured he’d have me kneeing my attacker in the groin, but he concentrates on the same general pressure point concepts—exactly how he likes to send me into the stratosphere. But these points are way meaner than anything he’s done to me.
A sharp thumb-punch to the nostril area. A hard slash with the sides of my hands against the brachial nerves in either side of his neck. A short, jabbing punch with the heel of my hand to his solar plexus. He lets me practice on him, which I don’t mind until he urges me to strike harder, ever harder. The last thing I want to do is hurt him.
