Master of Hearts: A Domination And Submission Romance Anthology Read online

  “Aren’t you…? Aren’t you working? The resort doesn’t have a problem with you…with you using the amenities during the day?”

  He cocked one thick, brooding brow at me and nodded. “Oh, they might if I didn’t own it.” He shrugged. “Sometimes, I get a whim.”

  I sat up straighter, my back stiffened by a surge of annoyance. “But you said you were the manager.”

  So slowly, he shook his head as that smile spread over his face, deepening the GQ contours of his sculpted cheeks. “I said I managed the resort, and I do. The two roles aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.”

  A quick bit of math in my head—private island, tropics, twenty thousand acres—told me the man had laid down at least eight figures for Ilha de Flor, and that was assuming he’d built the resort after the purchase. The permits, the building, the infrastructure all would have doubled the price, to be conservative. Again, I found satisfaction in the confirmation of my suspicions. The man was money, a lot of it. Again, I felt a bone-deep irritation that there was something else to Knight, though, that wasn’t quite right. And again, I found myself attracted to a wealthy playboy. Or was it just Casanovas I couldn’t stay away from, be they heirs of industry like Penn or blue collar charmers like my high school drop out of a father?

  I was working myself into a temper when Adrian added, “Owner or no, it could be a problem, however, were I to lock myself into the sauna…all alone…with a woman…if she found the attention unwelcome.”

  My mouth worked soundlessly around the shape of words that wouldn’t come out of my mouth. For a full ten seconds, I wasn’t sure if I was trying to curse this man, call for help, or moan.

  “Is my attention unwelcome, Miss Bloom?” he pressed, and when all I did—all I could do—was snort out a sort of indignant breath, Adrian Knight leaned over and kissed me. His mouth lingered a hairsbreadth from me for a heartbeat before full, silken lips fitted themselves perfectly to mine. There was a moment when I groaned my hesitant disapproval, then mewed despite myself as his lips opened mine wide and his tongue lapped slowly and sensuously into my mouth. He tasted of the sweet lemon tea he’d had with lunch. I could at least hope I tasted of honey and chocolate.

  His kiss was…the best I’d ever had. No one had ever used their tongue like that, filling my mouth, sweeping the insides of my cheeks and the back of my teeth, warm and soft but constant and insistent. I felt penetrated, more intimately than if his member was between my legs, and I grew just as slick as if he were fucking me. My own wetness wept from my sex and coated my inner thighs as I squeezed them tight.

  I jerked back with a strangled cry and broke the kiss when I felt his fingers sliding between my knees through the opening in the robe. No aptitude for casual sex, wasn’t that what I’d concluded? But no reason I couldn’t learn, I remembered the argument went.

  Adrian’s breath had warmed and thickened as much as mine, I noted with an uncharacteristic thrill of…of power at the idea that I was turning on this incredibly handsome man. A man of wealth. And sophistication. And skill. I just stared at him for what seemed like minutes, at the slightly exaggerated rise and fall of his chest, at the deep black pupils dominating the irises of his eyes as they studied me every bit as intently.

  Another kiss, harder but brief, and Adrian Knight spoke with his lips grazing my mouth. “Spread your legs,” he said, each soft word smoothly but painstakingly enunciated under his heavy breath. His hand shifted to grip my leg but did not venture higher, and not just because I was clutching his wrist. He pulled his head back to look me in the face. Voice a little steadier, a little firmer, he said, “Tell me to go, and I will.”

  My gaze sank to my hand clamped around his wrist. He obviously couldn’t leave if I didn’t let go. And I didn’t let go.

  Lips at my ear, and more insistently this time, he commanded again, “Spread your legs.”

  Something pulled at my pit of my stomach, like the vibration of a cord tied right to my core. It was the same sinking, swooning feeling that came over me whenever Penn had gotten forceful and demanding in bed. Like I was suspended, swinging loose by that tether of sensation, unable to find purchase to steady myself. I didn’t release Adrian’s hand, but my knees parted, and his fingers slid up immediately to cup my smooth-shaven mons. His middle finger traced my slit, and when I gasped, his mouth took mine again. With his other hand, he pulled my hair and my head back for this onslaught from his lips. Pins jerked free, and my hair looped down in mussed tangles over his fist and along my sweat-dampened neck.

  One finger plunged inside me, and Adrian finally dragged his mouth from mine. “You’re wet, Miss Bloom,” he rasped as his lips traveled along my jaw to my ear. “Very, very wet.” A second finger joined the first to punctuate the statement. My pussy ached and clenched hungrily around the sudden invasion. When my fingernails dug into his wrist, just as I gave a little involuntary buck, he added a third.

  “Oh, god.” I bit my lip, afraid I’d just screamed. I sounded so loud to myself, but he didn’t seem startled or concerned.

  Adrian’s tongue flicked against my earlobe just as his fingers pulsed deep and hit my G-spot. “Who are you wet for?”

  I tried to bow my head, at a loss, unwilling to admit I’d been fantasizing about him minutes before this, but Adrian’s hold on my hair wouldn’t allow it.

  “Is it Brian?” he pressed, looking down at me, scrutinizing my reaction. That had been my masseuse’s name, and the back of my neck tightened as my gaze drifted to Knight’s. Would he have arranged for the handsome masseuse to handle my massage? Why? To…to see if it would affect me? To prime me for this encounter? I suddenly felt very much like prey, and the brief shift in Adrian’s expression told me he felt the quiver that passed through me at the thought.

  “Or are you wet for me? Thinking about how I touched you today, how close I was?”

  “Yes.” I surprised myself with the sighed confession. Even with Penn, even as I submitted to commanding sex with secret relish, I wasn’t one to admit my desires or reactions aloud. It made me feel bared and vulnerable in a way that even this improbable situation, this shameless risk, did not.

  “Then I’d best deliver, hadn’t I?” Knight taunted in a ragged chuckle before his fingers started moving in earnest, started playing that perfect spot with deep, relentless strokes that opened and stretched me.

  My head lolled even further back, and Adrian’s lips followed the column of my throat down the neck of the robe. “Open it,” he ordered, his hands still occupied, and I did. That sinfully skilled tongue of his lapped a hot, wet circle around one peaked nipple before he drew it into his mouth. His teeth sank lightly into the soft flesh around my areola, and he sucked and gnawed in time with the pulsing of his fingers up my aching sex.

  By now, my hold on his wrist was a desperate attempt not to fend him off but to urge his fingers deeper. I was starting to shudder, my nonsensical mutterings just a high quaver in the back of my throat. My thighs and my arms and my spine were all tensed again, so much worse than before my massage, as I strained toward a different type of surrender.

  Adrian’s mouth came off my breast and curved momentarily in acknowledgment of my sighed protest. “Are you ready?” he asked. “Are you going to come on my fingers?”

  “Yes.”

  “Say please.”

  I mewed in dismay but hesitated only a moment. “Please.”

  “Yes.” He rushed me with a flurry of hard, nipping kisses. “Do it,” he said between gasped breaths. “Come for me.”

  Adrian’s thumb against my twitching clitoris made sure I obeyed. That seeking flutter in the depth of my pussy became a hard shudder through my groin, down my thighs, up my back. I closed my legs over his hand, trapping him, and still he played my flesh, drawing out my orgasm from warm ripples to an extended vibration that bordered on pain.

  Only when I pleaded, “No more,” and began to shove his hand away did Knight relent.

  His fingers came out of me and flew up to
trace my lips. “Suck,” he ordered, a hint of need in his voice. I did, tasting the subtly sweet tang of my own cream on his fingers, my sex still quivering with the last waves of my climax. His reaction to my obedience, to the feeling of my tongue swirling against his skin and to the soft but steady suction, shone in the glaze of lust in his eyes and the coarse edge to his breathing.

  Finally dragging his hand from my hair, which now fell loose about my face, Adrian jerked at the belt of his robe. “You take direction very well, Miss Bloom,” he rasped before coming to his knees on the bench and pulling his robe back to present his erect cock. Withdrawing his fingers from my mouth, eyeing my lips fervently, he said again, “Suck.”

  Infused with the afterglow of such a strong orgasm, and as languidly as if this was a dream, I shifted and turned to run my hands up Knight’s powerful, tanned thighs. My gaze followed the deeply defined muscles up to his groin, to the smooth bulge of his full, heavy balls and his engorged shaft, jutting up sharply. Even having just come, even having just begged “no more”, the sight of his thick, rampant cock made me burn for penetration again. I couldn’t remember ever being so turned on, behaving so shamelessly, feeling so insatiable. And there was that briefest moment when I wondered if this was what it was like for a man, losing all concerns to pure lust. I could almost understand…

  Mindful of Adrian’s command, underscored with his hand cupping the back of my head and urging me forward, I took the broad head of his member into my mouth and lapped and sucked at it like a tender delicacy. A thick, salty drop of pre-cum rose to my ministrations, and I used my tongue to smear it along his tip before experimentally sinking my mouth lower along his shaft. He felt even thicker than he looked, and my jaw strained to accommodate him. I bobbed my head down on him two, three, four times, trying to go deeper, but it was difficult with his size. The catch in his breath and the jerk of his hips made me think he was enjoying it, until he abruptly yanked me away by the hair.

  I felt a moment of horror at the possibility that he didn’t like the way I was using my mouth, before he stripped the robe back off my shoulders and pushed me naked, face-first against the wall of the sauna. Gritting his teeth, he mounted me from behind, bare, no condom. I should have protested, but the sudden flare of pain as the bulging head of his cock breached the tight ring of my entrance took my breath and sense away. My fingertips flattened and dug against wooden wall, before Adrian’s hands closed high on my arms and pulled them behind my back. He used the hard arch of my body for leverage as he forced his velvety but unyielding rod farther and farther into me one punishing thrust at a time.

  “Let. Me. In,” he huffed, as though my strained inner walls resisted him intentionally.

  With my cheek pressed flush to the wood, and breathless from the sharp thrusts and the dull, throbbing pleasure left behind each time he drew back for another volley, I could only whimper and pant my way through the furious fucking I was taking at the hands of what was essentially a gorgeous stranger.

  When at last he was sunk to the hilt inside me, I felt his rough face at my shoulder. Between ravenous, gnawing kisses along my neck and shoulder blades, Adrian sighed out, “Chloe.” And all the resistance, all the rigidity I didn’t know was there, flowed out of me. He must have felt it in the way I sagged against the wall or the push of my ass back against him, because he recoiled his hips and thrust them forward, setting a new rhythm of deep, thorough strokes that seated him tip to root inside me every time.

  The way he started to hold his breath between merciless plunges, the rasp to his panting, told me Knight was close to his end. Before I could gather myself enough to remind him he wasn’t using protection, he pulled out of me, making me yelp as the broad head of his cock slid from my tender pussy. Roughly at first, he used his hold on my hair to pull my head down toward his shaft, wet and gleaming with my juices. I started to lose my balance as one knee slipped to the lower bench, scraping my shin, and he grabbed my shoulders to steady me.

  “All right?” he muttered in a husky voice. When I nodded, stable and ready now on hands and knees, he smoothed my hair back from my face with shaking but gentle hands. “Open your mouth.”

  He worked one hand up and down the length of him when I did. I didn’t know which I wanted to watch more, the enticingly lewd stoke of his hand along his own shaft or the soft, unguarded expression on his face, open-mouthed and hollow-cheeked. Then he was coming, spilling pearly white cream over my bottom lip and my tongue. I swallowed as fast as I could, noting hints of almond and cinnamon lingering at the back of my throat. He rocked his hips and sighed haltingly, swallowing hard between breaths. Now he was the one who looked disarmingly vulnerable.

  As the fog of impulse and need cleared in my head, and Adrian sat back on the bench catching his breath, I found my robe and clutched it to my chest. I didn’t really have the time to nurse regret or start to feel awkward. He was there beside me suddenly, wrapping the robe around my shoulders again and tying the belt for me. Like…like he didn’t want me to feel ashamed.

  But his expression bore a distinct edge of…something… Chagrin, maybe. Avoidance, certainly, as he caressed my cheek without looking at me before straightening his robe and leaving. Through the unlocked door, I noted.

  ***

  Why had I done it?

  I leaned back on the buffed stone balustrade of the upper balcony wishing the evening was cooler, watching the three professional samba dancers on my staff teaching simple steps to the guests, and trying not to mentally replay every moment of my encounter with Chloe in the sauna. It had been risky enough arranging for Brian as her masseuse, trying to bring out that sensuality I glimpsed below the surface of her dignified façade. More careless still to come down to the spa to check on her, only to learn she was alone in the sauna. But it was unforgivably reckless to follow her inside, move on her so abruptly, and take such a dominating hand with her at the very first opportunity.

  Tugging at the tie of my tuxedo, suddenly as irritated by it as I was with myself, I wondered crossly what had happened to taking my time and enjoying the novelty of real seduction. Conflicting shards of memory vied for prominence as that all too brief liaison in the sauna flashed through my mind again. The dewy glow of her moist skin. The little groans of protest in the back of her throat as I’d first kissed her. Then the way she had relented, by reluctant measures, until what I had intended to be a single kiss had turned into hard rutting inside that soft, smooth body. She’d said nothing afterward, eyes glazed and distant as she covered herself with her robe. Irrationally concerned that she had been about to cry, I couldn’t wrap her up fast enough. Couldn’t make it better.

  I shook my head and surveyed the crowd again. Chloe still hadn’t made an appearance at dinner. Was she hiding in her suite? Hiding from me?

  It was standard behavior for me with my sexual partners—the domination, the rough handling, the confident presumption. With Chloe, though, the rules and the power structure hadn’t been set in advance. Yes, she had obeyed. Yes, she had come for me, so exquisitely exposed at the end. But how much of that had been the shock of so unfamiliar an experience, the force of the moment sweeping her along despite herself? I’d know soon enough, I guessed, seeing her reaction to me over dinner…or not seeing her at all.

  When Chloe finally appeared, bare-shouldered in a white strapless cocktail dress, weaving her way aimlessly through the dinner crowd, my reaction was an achy tightening of my gut rather than a sigh of relief. She glanced at me, a tangible meeting of our gazes despite the distance and the dim mood lighting. There wasn’t that awkward turn of her back I’d dreaded, but she also did not approach me.

  I folded my arms, mildly annoyed that Chloe didn’t come straight to me, and watched as she made her way toward the dance instructors instead. Lithe, dark-skinned Tia greeted her, smiled and laughed as they chatted, then walked her through several basic moves while making small corrections to Chloe’s poses and postures. Normally, I’d have enjoyed the sight as much as any
man—two beautiful women dancing together, the subtle brush of one’s hands along the other’s body. Instead, I just waited for Tia to stop blocking my view.

  Seeing Chloe finally making her way toward me, I considered—passingly—straightening up and putting on another debonair smile. Hadn’t I just been brooding over the possibility of scaring away my quarry? But it felt good to indulge my dark mood, and I maintained my nonplussed stance, ankles crossed and arms folded. I wanted her to sense my disapproval, to feel off balance and anxious, for making me wait.

  I expected, if she actually finished her circuitous journey to me through the press of mulling bodies, that she’d present herself with a wary smile and a restrained greeting. But Chloe stood before me for only a moment, dainty feet and high heel strappy sandals together, hands clasped loosely in front of her, before breaking into an utterly charming grin.

  “Dance with me, Mr. Knight?”

  That I hadn’t seen coming. Nor the change in her demeanor. She was more clear-eyed, the slope of her shoulders more relaxed. Even I wasn’t arrogant enough to attribute the shift to one good shagging. Now I was more than up for finding out what was going through the head of my Miss Bloom.

  Without comment, I came up from my moody repose and caught her hand to lead her to the shadowy edge of the ill-defined dance floor. Though considerably less flamboyant than a pair of real samba dancers would have been, we spun and stepped lightly through two whole songs—Chloe actually laughing—before I simply pulled her against me and swayed slowly with her as I peered at her pale, upturned face. Her lips were parted so slightly, loose, willing.

  Against those lips, I muttered, “What are you doing here, Miss Bloom? And don’t say dancing. What are you doing on Ilha de Flor, on this cruise of yours?”