Cards of Love Read online

  “He’s with Vivienne and Morgan now. He’s well cared for.” Her eyes narrow in on me. “Stop trying to change the subject.”

  Fine. “So you know the truth and you want, what? Lessons?”

  She walks up to me and presses her finger under my chin. The supercilious way she demands my attention sends a bolt of hot lust right to my cock.

  This is new.

  This did not happen last time.

  “I want everything,” she says. “And you’re going to give it to me. You owe me that at least.”

  “Owe you for what?”

  “I think you know,” she says.

  That is an unpleasant thing to hear, given our history, because if one stacked pain on top of pain on a scale, mine would far outweigh hers.

  “You mean our parting at the lake. But your heart didn’t stay broken for long, did it?” I ask. “Or were you not fucking Jack Pelleas the very next day after I left?”

  Crack.

  Her hand on my face is bright and fast and stinging. “I hate you,” she whispers, all happiness fled from her face. “I fucking hate you.”

  “I know that’s not true,” I say. “And you know that’s not true.”

  My cheek feels like it’s blooming with a hot flower of shameful awareness. I think I want her to hit me again.

  She doesn’t. Neither does she contradict me.

  Instead, she wheels around and leaves.

  I pass a sleepless night in the bed.

  I’m angry and afraid and ashamed.

  And aroused beyond measure. And I’d be lying if I claimed it wasn’t because of that slap. Because even now, her chains tie me to her whim, to her design.

  What if they tied me to her pleasure too?

  It’s near the winter solstice, and so it feels like the morning will never come to this fog-wrapped island. With the cold mist pressing against the window and my body aching with every feeling it’s possible to feel about someone who was once a lover and now a captor, I give in to the rude urges pulsing through me.

  I haven’t needed…this…in years. But it’s Nimue, it’s always been Nimue, and something is so different this time, so potent, that I don’t have any armor against it. It’s like it gets right to the beating heart of me. The chain, the strike. The shame and the pain and the thing between us that’s always, always been about power, even at the very beginning.

  She’s no masochist indeed…but what if I am?

  This is new.

  The kilt makes it easy, too easy maybe, to indulge in this shameful need to fuck. I roll onto my stomach and grind my hips into the mattress, fucking the soft fabric of the kilt until the friction gets to be too much and I have to flip the kilt up around my waist.

  I fuck the sheets then, feeling the still-sensitive cheek that remembers the crack of her palm, listening to the melodious noise of her chain fastened on me as the motion of the bed sends it clinking and tapping against the flagstone floor. I think about seeing her for the first time in this life twenty-three years ago.

  She’d been eighteen, then.

  And I twenty-seven, nearly twenty-eight.

  Twenty-seven years of waiting to see my destined lover and death-bringer again, and when I finally found her, she’d been a Catholic schoolgirl with a backpack and Mary Janes. It was appalling how deeply I wanted her anyway, but not surprising. She’d been young in our first life too, barely seventeen when she trapped me.

  Not that her age had stopped her from getting—

  Don’t. It doesn’t bear thinking about. Not when all I want is a quick, dirty release against this bed.

  I can feel the air cool on my ass and thighs as I brace myself up on my forearms, my head hanging between my shoulders as I press my swollen erection into the mattress. The sheets and blankets tangled around my legs swish, and the sound of my own pulse and heavy breathing drown out everything else.

  I think about the Nimue from my first life who flirted with coy glances and chaste kisses, these innocent little touches that drove me wild. The Nimue from twenty-three years ago with her frank and unabashed desire for me.

  The Nimue now who chains me and threatens me and treats me like a barely loved pet. Strange that’s the thing that I hold onto as my orgasm twines tighter and tighter in the depths of my groin. Not the clumsy advances of a fresh girl or the wild recklessness of the barely-a-woman who rode my lap in her Catholic school uniform. But the restraints and the strike of a woman intent on taking everything I have—my life and my soul and anything else I can offer up along with it—God, that has my belly tight and my balls drawing up hot and ready, and I’m going to spill all over these sheets in a disgusting mess—

  A hand, cool and soft, drops onto the exposed curve of my ass, and I freeze.

  “No, keep going,” says Nimue. All trace of the pain she felt yesterday seems to have vanished. “I quite like watching.”

  Shame and eagerness fill me with equal measure, and I nearly want to obey her. I want her to see me come, I want her indifferent hand on my ass as I fuck the bed in desperation. But desire is a thing I’ve only ever experienced around her, and I’ve had so very much time not being around her. So much practice with reserve and detachment.

  So I force myself to get to my knees and cover my nakedness. “I’m sorry,” I mutter, scrubbing at my hair and wishing I felt my age and not like a fresh-faced youth. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “Obviously,” she replies, a smile in her voice. When I look over my shoulder at her, I see the smile on her face as well—slightly too wide for the narrow oval of her face. It’s painfully endearing, and it reminds me of how capable of happiness she’s always been. It’s a strange thing to think of one’s captor—to reconcile all that bubbling, innate joy with the ability to trap and exploit someone—but nevertheless, it’s true. Happiness is in her nature. Just like destroying me is.

  To my surprise, she climbs on the bed behind me with one hand sliding comfortably around my hip to hold me in place as her knees come to rest on either side of my own. She’s tall, but I’m taller, and my ass presses against her stomach. I didn’t get a good look at what she was wearing earlier, but it’s something dark and thin and gauzy, and I can feel the firm divot of her navel against my back as I’m pressed against her.

  “Can I touch you?” she asks up into my ear.

  “Rather an odd thing for an abductress to ask her victim, is it not? Permission?”

  The smile is back in her voice as she answers. “Maybe. I want it anyway.”

  Her free hand strokes along my thigh in a touch that feels casually proprietary, and it is, of course it is. Not only have my heart and soul always been hers, but my body as well—my body that can only feel and respond to the woman who’s doomed to destroy it.

  Fate is cruel like that.

  “Yes,” I say, feeling acute thirst and hunger and greed for the hand that’s currently trailing through the dark hair on my hard thigh. “Yes. Touch me.”

  The hand moves under the kilt for real now, her fingertips brushing against my balls and then up the sensitive seam there to my root.

  “Already close,” she murmurs in my ear. “How extraordinary.”

  Well. I suppose it’s less extraordinary when you think about the last ten hours I’ve spent in acute arousal, but I’m beyond the power of speech now and can’t answer her anyway.

  She circles my girth with her hand and slowly drags her grip up to the crown and back down again. Pre-cum had already begun spilling from me earlier, but now it’s back in renewed force, slicking her fingers against my throbbing erection.

  “Christ, you’re big,” she observes, giving my penis a hard squeeze. “I forgot.”

  She says it in the kind of way you’d say it about a stud horse, the way centuries-ago grandmothers would gossip about which young men they wanted to breed babies on their granddaughters. It shouldn’t fill me with satisfaction, with pride, but it does, it does. I want everything about me to please her, I want, in a strange and impossibl
e to articulate way, to make her proud of me. This is like nothing we’ve ever shared before, but if having a thick erection is enough to keep that happy note in her voice, then I’m helpless not to oblige.

  “Can you come for me?” she says. “I want to see that big cock at work. I want to see how much seed it has inside for me.”

  My head drops forward as my stomach clenches into tight ripples of muscle and my hips hammer my cock in and out of the unforgiving vise of Nimue’s hand. It takes only a few seconds of breathless, dirty work and then I’m erupting all over—her hand, my kilt, the bed—twenty-three years of pent-up desire ripping out of my body with jagged, merciless force.

  I come and I come and I come, barely able to breathe, unable to see, and all the while with my captor’s fingers digging into my hip and her cuff tight around my ankle. I come while she coos her approval, while she gives me one or two final strokes as if to milk all the semen right out of me, and then I gradually, dizzily come back to earth.

  “I always say it’s good to start as we mean to go on,” Nimue says, wiping her hand on my kilt and then climbing gracefully off the bed.

  It’s everything I can do to hold myself upright after that hurricane of an orgasm. “What do you mean?”

  She stands at the side of my bed, and we’re the same height like this, so when she tucks a finger under my chin so our eyes meet, they meet at the same level. There’s no hiding her excitement from me…and there’s certainly no hiding whatever is on my face from her.

  “Merlin, how did you think I was going to break you down enough to take what I needed? How did you think I would manufacture your surrender? Conversation? Games of chess?”

  Well, once you trapped me in a cave under a pretense, made it so I loved you beyond all reason, and then you betrayed me and left me with nothing, not even breath.

  “I don’t know, Nimue.”

  Her other hand slides down the ridged expanse of my chest and stomach until she cups my spent member in her hand.

  She gives it a callous squeeze.

  “We begin today.”

  4

  Why am I submitting to this?

  Just a few minutes ago, I allowed Nimue to cuff my wrists, attach a chain to the cuffs, and then lead me down a dark hallway to an even darker room. It has no windows, and it makes me think, given the topography outside my bedroom, that this part of the house actually burrows up against the hill behind us. Maybe even into the hill itself. Like a cave.

  I should feel bitter about that. I should feel bitter about all of it actually—being ripped away from my life and brought back to the one place on this planet where I suffered more than any other. Bitter about being struck and cuffed and chained, being made to release like a beast on my knees.

  Bitter that none of it actually makes me bitter at all.

  Ripped away from my life? Honestly? What life?

  Embry will be President, Greer and her unborn child are safe, and Ash is resting and waiting for the time when he can welcome his lovers back into his arms. My work—the sole aim and focus of my fifty years—is finished. There’s nothing waiting to be done, no more battles left to fight on Ash’s behalf.

  The one place on this planet where I suffered more than any other? It’s also the one place where I felt more joy than any other. The place where I grew up, where I found the presence some call God, where I found my sight and my purpose, and where I fell in love.

  And as for being restrained? Masturbated like I’m a teenage boy who can’t be trusted to appropriately control his own body?

  Well, I think the last twenty-four hours prove how not bitter I am about that.

  So, I had to ask myself as I looked at the presented cuffs, what’s the use in fighting this? My life’s work is finished, no one is waiting for me back home, no one needs me. And perhaps this is fate anyway, and I of anyone know that fate can’t be avoided. One can trick it, coax it, fight it, maybe even defeat it, but one can’t run from it—and I’ve seen too many people try.

  And anyway, why would I run from the woman I love?

  So when Nimue approached me with those cuffs, I offered my wrists like a prisoner turning himself in. If these are to be my last days on earth, I might as well enjoy them.

  Though the room she’s led me to is dark, it’s not some kind of dungeon. The white plaster walls reflect the light of two warm lamps and the few flickering candles set in unfussy candlesticks around the room. Thick, richly colored rugs cover the wide flagstones, and bookshelves line two of the walls. There’s a long, upholstered lounge with a large basket filled with blankets nearby.

  If it weren’t for the leather paddling horse and racks of BDSM implements, this room could be any room in any cottage anywhere.

  Nimue chains me to another eyebolt in the floor, like I’m a horse that needs tethering, and I flush at the casual ownership it conveys.

  “This place belongs to you,” I say, to cover my discomfort at how strong the feeling is. At how much I like being led and shackled by her. “You’ve had it for a while. Why?”

  This could be any expensive, sympathetically renovated holiday cottage, but those don’t come with eyebolts in the floor and mounted racks of canes and whips. Those don’t come with bookshelves full of the books I know Nimue loves—old books on folklore and magic and herbs.

  She straightens and looks around the room with the soft, smiling pride of a homeowner. “It’s mine. I’ve always felt drawn to this island, and so I bought this place last year, had it done up the way I like.”

  “With canes and clamps, obviously.”

  Many other people would bristle at the words, at my tone, which is shockingly jealous, but Nimue is too sanguine to let my pettiness infect her. “We’ve been apart for some time, Merlin,” she says, amused. “You might imagine that my tastes have ripened in the last quarter century.”

  “Was it Morgan?”

  Morgan is Nimue’s niece, and the same woman who introduced Ash to kink all those years ago.

  “I suppose you would know, wouldn’t you? Having your gifts and all. Yes, it was Morgan. She took me to Lyonesse many years ago and Mark mentored me.”

  Mark. The king of kink in this life, the king of the lost land of Lyonesse in our last one.

  “But you are the first person I’ve done kink with here in this house, if that consoles your fragile male ego.”

  It does, strangely, even though I’ve accepted a long time ago that any fidelity between us would be one-sided.

  Have I mentioned fate is cruel?

  Nimue unfastens my kilt and lets it drop to my feet. “I’d love to keep it on you, flip up your skirt like a naughty schoolgirl to spank you, but I want to see your body too badly.”

  I’m ashamed at how much her words arouse me, and there’s no hiding my body’s response from her. She smiles as she traces a warm fingertip up the underside of my swelling organ. “Have you ever done this, Merlin?” she asks, in a voice like she’s asking me if I’ve ever had ice cream. “Have you ever played with power?”

  Only with you and only in another life.

  And even then, it wasn’t kinky—it was literally life and death.

  “No,” I say. “I never have.”

  “Hmm, a real shame.” Her hands move to the lean lines of my hips, up to the broad swell of my shoulders. I’ve honestly never given thought to my body—it’s merely a vessel for me to perform my destined duties in—but right now, right here, I feel every inch of my body like it’s brand new to me. I feel the flat planes of my stomach and the swells of my biceps. I feel the taut curves of my backside and the hard lines of my thighs. I feel the fullness of my balls and the heavy weight of my penis.

  I feel pride and exhilaration when I realize Nimue’s hands are not as steady as she’d like me to believe as she caresses me.

  Her lips come to rest on the curve of my spine, right between my shoulder blades. “Such a body,” she breathes. “The perfect body for me. Strong and supple.” She squeezes a flank and my head drop
s forward as I try to catch my breath. “Such a shame that you keep it so buttoned up all the time. How do you find your pleasure, Merlin? Do you have a mistress, maybe? Or a male lover tucked away somewhere outside of DC? Or maybe you like escorts—bloodless and efficient, just like you.”

  Would she even believe the truth? That there’s been no one since her? No one before her? No one else in this life or any other life?

  “I don’t,” I say, my words breaking into a moan as she casually inspects the heft and weight of my balls. “I don’t find release. I don’t fuck.”

  She presses her cheek to my back. “That’s impossible; am I to believe that this giant, gorgeous cock is trapped and lonely all the time? That this sensual, masculine mouth never kisses? This body is perfect for fucking. It’s wasteful not to be using it to give pleasure to those who need it.”

  She sounds like she’s lecturing one of her college students right now, and I almost enjoy it.

  Fine, not almost, I do. I do enjoy it. Being lectured, being tutted at. Being fondled and petted.

  “Mount the bench, bend over, and stretch out your hands,” she says, smacking the side of my thigh and walking over to a wall of toys.

  “Don’t I receive some kind of safe word at this point?” I ask, but I also obey her.

  “Yes, of course.” She is tapping her chin as she stares at her wall, as if trying to decide which piece of artwork she likes best. “How about enchanted?”

  I close my eyes, glad she can’t see the pain that is surely creasing my face right now. “Yes. Enchanted.”

  “And your limits?”

  “I again am forced to point out the irony of a captor asking such a question.”

  Nimue selects a sturdy riding crop from the wall and turns to face me. “I accept the irony, Merlin. Now what are they?”

  I’ve honestly never been in this position before—never needed to contemplate my limits because my entire life up until this point has been limits. A narrow, lonely path, a giant arrow of destiny pointing me toward my work and away from anything else.