Unmeasured (Unmatched Book 1) Read online

  But the question of who was so much easier.

  “Master.”

  *

  The word fell from her lips like lead, and he realized he’d been only playing with that word until then. He’d only been a master of the game, the puppeteer of malleable playthings, and the difference was stark. He answered her with his eyes on hers, feeling like he’d never heard the word before, but he knew he could very well be owned by it.

  He gathered her into his arms and cradled her to his chest.

  Oleg hadn’t been hard when he grabbed the whip or cast his first strike. His rage had taken him beyond kink, beyond control. But now his cock swelled for reasons beyond his comprehension. He wasn’t hard with his dominance over her. His cock didn’t throb over what he could take from her. He was hard with the knowledge there was no taking between them at all. Nothing transactional.

  He bent behind her, his fingers resting on the metal at her waist, his tongue flat and licking across the very angry welt slanting over the roundest part of her perfect ass. She was not to be mastered or conquered, not in any manner he’d imagined. She accepted his pain, absorbed it, synthesized it for her own needs. A frequency hummed between them, and it was constant and even and soothing. It was as if her chastity belt was a conductor of it, a kind of magic that he couldn’t pretend wasn’t there.

  He stood, his hand deep in his pocket searching for the key to her hardware. The sight of her in sexual bondage was suddenly offensive to him. She’d bled for him under lashes that ripped the air with the force of his fury. He needed all that she had to give and didn’t give a shit he was too far gone to fuck her with the reverence she deserved.

  “I’m going to take everything from you,” he growled.

  “Have what you need, Master,” she said, and he didn’t miss the permission she gave or the way her whispered words caused his cock to leap against his zipper.

  He crouched behind her and aligned the key. The metal contraption dropped to the floor with a clank. With thumbs lifting the reddened cheeks modeling his mark, he spread her, revealing her glistening cunt to him. She was so wet for his wrath, so greedy for more. He stood up and yanked her hair. Her head snapped back as a chopped gasp fell from her lips. Then he pressed her against the wall, his hand wanting more purchase on her golden tresses, and he took it, stretching her neck long for his mouth. His hand found his own belt, tearing it loose with the dexterous handling of a man who knew what he wanted. He’d never been so certain about anything before. He wanted to own her inside and out.

  Fully dressed, he stabbed into her fragile, naked body, and she took him like a knife into butter. His first stroke was sharp and deep and claiming. It was violent and full of rage and she hummed. The next stroke was practically vengeful, and she melted. He kicked her legs apart and lowered his angle, sending his cock into her like an insistent probe, intending to find her end. She propped her ass up and against his hips, inviting more of the same. He took her balls deep, and she rewarded him with a lilting gasp, as if she choked on how much she wanted him. Fuck, he loved that sound.

  “Take it,” he growled. He tightened his hand in her hair and pressed her into the wall with his full weight. He lifted one of her legs and pushed it flat so that her thigh and knee kissed the plaster. “Take. It. Deep.” The force of his bullish thrusts ratcheted her incrementally higher until she practically levitated against the wall, her toe only barely touching the floor. He’d have fucked her into that wall if he could. And he tried, because her cunt was a slippery slope to delirium. There was blistering light inside of her, at her limit’s end, and it beckoned him even deeper. Hard rhythmic pops of his hips against her tart of an ass were received with bright notes carried on her chopped breath. It was a primal composition of soprano and percussion. Their song became an anthem, and the melody resonated in the room, raw and honest. It was all catalyst and reaction as he hammered desperate puffs of precious breath from her lungs, swallowing her between the bulk of his frame and the wall. Her sing-song chirps climbed both in pitch and in volume. As he meant to wreck her, she meant to be reborn in her climax, and the clash of these two intentions was going to obliterate him. If she got even a measure hotter or even a tiny bit wetter than she already was, he was going to lose his fucking mind.

  He pulled her hair tighter. “Not yet! Hold it. Do you hear me? Hold it!”

  “Yes, Master.” Her voice quivered in a way that brought him face-to-face with his own mortality. Could he live without hearing her ignite the air with those words? Had he ever even known what that word could mean coming from this woman? He could die trying to find the edges of her submission, and he might. He meant to take everything from her, and yet she managed to strip him to the bone as she trembled against the wall and her cunt knotted like a steel strap around his throbbing cock.

  She couldn’t hold it. She shivered and bucked and flooded his cock in irreverent heat.

  Big, fat tears flowed over her cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she bellowed through the brunt of her orgasm. It was a broken, beautiful plea. “Master, I’m sorry.”

  Her apology broke him too. “I forgive you,” he said as he spent a rush of milky seed deep inside of her.

  *

  Samantha needed to look at him then, and so she turned around in the cage of his arms. It seemed every emotion had drained from his beleaguered limbs and now pooled in a mix of hot and cold on the floor. He retained only one, gratitude.

  “I unleashed upon you,” he said, and it sounded like his own apology.

  “I told you I would survive,” Samantha said on shaky breath. The ground was shaky too. His expertise with a whip would likely spare her any lasting wounds, though the sting of his rage still hummed across her skin. Hours would pass before she would stop vibrating from the savage way he’d fucked her. But the leftover tears she swiped from her face weren’t because of either of those things.

  He chased the last persistent salty drop away with his tongue, trailing it backward from her neck to her ear. “You did tell me that, didn’t you?” he said with a smile that filled her with pride.

  “I tried not to come. I really did.”

  “I know. You only need more practice.” His fingers wandered her over sensitive flesh and slotted around her clit. “You were perfect,” he said. “Even in your failure to obey, you were perfect.” Languid strokes of his fingers into the twin valleys of her cunt were mind-bending in their tenderness. She shivered at the knowledge that he could be so tender when the size of his body and the strength of his essence usually walked the line between oppressive and awe-inspiring. She melted against the wall behind her, and he showed her mercy, lifting her into his arms and laying her boneless onto the sofa.

  There was the issue of the door, ajar the entire time he ravaged her. She’d been mildly aware that Paolo and Ivan were both home and might have walked in at any given moment. The knowledge had only made her spiral to a deeper level of submission to him. He took her neither by committee nor with permission, because the moment belonged to him alone, and he knew it.

  He crossed the room, closed the door and applied the lock. When it was open, she’d felt exposed. With it locked, she felt kept. For Samantha, the sensations were two sides of the same priceless coin.

  Then he was back. “And you didn’t just survive, Lionceau. You earned some time in the sun.”

  Samantha glanced around the room, which remained undone with the wreck of books and the unfinished business in his trouser pocket. “You don’t have to…”

  “I’ve had enough darkness today,” he said. He pushed the trousers over his hips and then kicked off his shoes along with them.

  She waited with familiar bated breath as he pulled loose his tie and unbuttoned his shirt. “You’re beautiful,” she said, and it made him flash the rarest of purely entertained smiles.

  “No one calls me beautiful.”

  Her lip lifted in the corner, and she tilted her head. “And survives?”

  His hands took her under her kne
es. “Try me,” he said and lowered his lips to her pussy.

  Thick, heavy waves of pleasure challenged her ability to speak. He licked his lips and kissed her thigh. The reprieve helped her find her voice, and she put it to good use. “You’re beautiful.”

  She felt his lips stretch into another grin. “You’re a heathen,” he said. “I’m going to tame you.”

  As brutal as he’d been before, the soft caresses of his tongue on her clit were even more diabolical, because they conspired not only to own her, but to drive her insane. Then his two fingers ganged up on her senses as well, diving into her soaking-wet cunt at a pace set for slow and methodical annihilation. It wasn’t fair, the way he could own her with force and also pleasure, and even both at the same time.

  “Oh God, do you know how good that feels?” Her pussy clenched against his fingers in earnest.

  “Show me,” he said between adoring whole-mouth kisses of her clit.

  She revved her hips, and he spread her wider, holding her in suspended motion, ensuring she had no ability to move.

  “You forget yourself,” he said. “You are allowed nothing that I don’t give you.” His voice rippled over her sensitive labia, before he buried his tongue into her depths with long, prodding sweeps. “But lucky you, Lionceau. You’ve made me generous.” Another dangerously sweet lick, and he continued, “Show me what your pleasure tastes like.”

  She unraveled a little more, her cunt opening like a flower. He pressed three fingers inside her, and she moaned with satisfying fullness overtaking the dull ache of her empty cunt. Then he pulled them free and circled all three fingertips at the shallows of her entry. His contemptuous tongue bathed her clit with another slow lick. He tortured her with sweetness, so tender and worshipful that she felt both like a prisoner and a queen. Again, his fingers stole into her and rocked against her walls the way a devoted owner strokes the head of his most cherished pet.

  He swapped fullness with feverless licks and wrung her so tightly with need that the orgasm building deep within was a vengeful tsunami that promised to drown him.

  “Show me.”

  “Yes, Master,” she said, though she wondered if it had been out loud, because she couldn’t tell the difference between her moans and her thoughts. She came in a slow-moving storm of sensation that left her dazed and ready to drift off into the sudden nothingness left in its wake.

  In the calm that ensued, the late afternoon sun encased them in gold and embraced them in warmth. But it was the way he tucked himself behind her on the plushy down sofa and drew her close to his naked body that shone a light onto her soul.

  Chapter 26

  They lay together on the sofa, Samantha finding balance within the blissful silence. As every minute ticked by, the more connected they became, synced with intertwined limbs and harmonizing breaths She dosed with images of them both on a raft, making the impossible journey to the horizon together.

  “Let me tend to your wounds,” he said after what could have been an eternity.

  “No, I don’t want to move.”

  “You don’t have to,” he said and extricated himself from the nest of warmth they had created together.

  Samantha sighed and pouted, but he wasn’t deterred.

  “Roll over,” he said as he returned with the slender tube he retrieved from a chest of drawers by the door.

  “I thought you said I didn’t have to move.”

  “I’m too tired to whip you again, so just behave yourself.”

  She couldn’t entirely be sure he was joking. “Yes, Master.”

  With her hands folded under her cheek, she lay as still as she could while he delicately dabbed ointment onto the tiny cuts and welts.

  He brushed a lock of hair behind her ear, and she looked up at him. He took a moment not saying anything, weighing his words it seemed. Before long, they seemed too heavy to hold. “You are truly special,” he said.

  She swallowed.

  He paused and then spoke again. “Your submission is a weapon, and there is no disarming you. It’s always easy to take power from a submissive, but your submission is like quicksand, sucking me deeper, threatening to drown me. I survive you, Lionceau, not the other way around. Do you know how strong a man has to be to survive quicksand? It’s indescribable how much control it takes or how satisfying it feels to be your Master. I am in awe of you.”

  She turned to look at him. “You are in awe…of me?”

  His lip tweaked, and he nodded. The confession continued. “That doesn’t stop me from wanting to see you used. I enjoy it immensely.” He examined her closely, and his gaze was invasive. If he wanted to know how she felt about that, he’d have to wait until she figured it out. “And then there are other times that I want to see you rule.” His brow furrowed as he digested his own words, working them over in order to process. She did the same. “And I’ll be damned if those two things don’t collide with each other and happen all at once.”

  Her heart leapt and sank at the same time. “Why are you telling me this?”

  He flinched at her question, and she was instantly regretful of the way it had come out.

  Then, as if the moment was too big for itself, they were interrupted with the ringing of his phone. It took three rounds of melodic beeps to draw his attention away from her.

  He pulled himself back from her, and she was immediately mourning the ruined moment. She watched him fish the phone from his neatly folded jacket.

  “Yes, Marjorie.”

  She watched his expression morph from mild annoyance to anger in a matter of seconds.

  He reached for his pants. “Karina. She’s here?”

  Snap.

  Three syllables snatched her back to reality. Karina. His fiancée. Water already blurred her vision as she bolted upright. It had only taken forty-eight hours, and she really and truly had lost her mind. She couldn’t be getting heart tugs over Oleg, because this man, this gorgeous man of her every dark wish, was getting married to someone else.

  “Keep her there,” he said. “I’ll be out in a moment.”

  Samantha sprang into action, tearing off the sofa. She was painfully aware of her nudity in that moment, and she ripped his blazer from his hand then turned toward the door. He let the jacket go but didn’t miss her wrist. “Where are you going?”

  “I can’t stay here anymore. I need to go.”

  There was a moment of panic that flashed in his eyes, a moment of hurt, and then ferocity overtook that gaze. He swallowed and steel formed in his jaw. “Kneel.”

  But Samantha didn’t want to kneel. She didn’t want to kneel, because she wanted to kneel too fucking much. “No.”

  He took in a slow hissing breath and exhaled, as if it burned his chest. “Kneel.”

  “Please.” That plea was for herself to find the strength to resist him. “No.”

  Her words seem to injure him, and it was all the more reason she needed to go. She couldn’t find peace with him or light or fun in the dark or anything at all worth the weight in her heart because he didn’t belong to her.

  His brow cinched, and then he tilted his head. “Obey your Master, Lionceau,” he said, though his tone was soft and cajoling, as soft as the touch of his fingers now on her lips. “I know you want to obey your Master.”

  She saw it happening and could not move. He leaned down to kiss her, and his lips stole a chunk of her resolve. Fingers trailing downward over her collarbone, he devoured her doubts with his satin tongue. His fingers drifted lower until he held her fearful heart as it hammered behind his grasp of her breast.

  And then his phone rang again. She saw his fiancée’s name appear on the display.

  He shut it off, but it was too late. It had plucked her right back into reality. She scrambled away from him and grabbed her sketchbook and her phone.

  “No!” she shouted. “What was I thinking? You cannot be my Master, and I…I cannot feel this way about you.” Her thighs, still slick with his seed and her desire, mocked her for the fo
ol she’d allowed herself to become. “I didn’t sign up to be your fucking mistress.”

  “I don’t want a mistress,” he said.

  “I must be a fucking idiot to let myself start to…” She didn’t give that thought the courtesy of completion. Her hand flew to her pounding, aching heart. “I object!” Her fingers bit into her skin as she gripped her flesh and struggled to keep the wreckage contained. The touch of his fingers had scalded her, but she was even more worried about the damage raging inside. “Please, oh, please. I object,” she said again, and this time she was reminded of what Henri had said. They had taught her how to beg after all, only it was for a way to stop wanting what she couldn’t have. And now she knew where her limits lay. They lay at her Master’s feet, and she was certain she’d never survive watching him walk away.

  *

  “Stay,” he said, even as he’d resolved that she wouldn’t. Shards of regret cut deep when he opened the door.

  Samantha pushed passed him in a heartbeat, huddled in his jacket when she should be cradled in his arms. There, in a white fur coat and with faded lip gloss clinging to her chapped lips, stood Karina, intercepting her.

  She laughed. “That’s right, playtime’s over, slut. I need to speak to my fiancé.”

  “Shut the fuck up, Karina,” Oleg snapped before stepping past her, but Samantha cut away in a blur of creamy skin and black wool.

  Karina jumped in front of him.

  “Get out of my way,” he growled.

  “So you can run after that bitch? Please.”

  She was a waif under that puffy fur, with its dingy cuffs and torn pocket. “How did you get here? Are you even clean?” He wasn’t sure why he asked, except for the fact that any decent human being would have. Though he didn’t wait for the answer.

  He looked up and down the hall. Samantha wasn’t to be found. He took the stairs to her room. “Samantha!” There was no way he could allow her to run from him, not when she had taken his heart with her. “Samantha!” He opened the door, and the room was empty. He checked the bathroom. Nothing.