“Now put your hands behind your back,” he tells me.
My nipples brush the cold wall in front of me as I lock my wrists together behind my back. I gasp silently, shocked by the chill. What is he doing? What is he going to do? I can sense him prowling around behind me. I get that sensation—a tingly, hyperaware expectation in the skin that comes when someone is mere inches away from making contact with you. My neck, my shoulder, my back. My buttocks. His hand is taunting me with its closeness. I know it; I can sense it. And I’m desperate for it. I realize I’m swaying a little, rocking ever so slightly on my heels as my body answers the pull it feels toward his.
The hairs on the back of my neck stand up when I feel his lips gently brush my ear. “Stay still, Sloane. Otherwise I won’t be happy. You want to make me happy?”
A part of me kicks against this. The feminist in me who thinks a woman should never allow herself to be subjugated by a man. But then there’s the part of me that’s being breathed on by Zeth Mayfair, and it appears that part of me is getting final say. “Yes. Yes, I want to make you happy.”
Zeth makes a pleased rumbling sound at the base of his throat. There’s more movement from behind me and then something is being lifted over my head. Half a second of panic ensues where I wonder what the hell he’s doing, and I almost risk opening my eyes. I know he’s watching me, though. I keep them shut.
“Good girl. That’s my good girl,” he says, repeating it over and over again, like he’s soothing a wild animal. That’s how I feel right now—unsure and nervous. Alongside that is the thrill, though. The thrill of stepping into the unknown. Of handing the reins over to someone else and trusting them implicitly. I suck in a sharp breath as something insanely cold touches my neck—metal. It feels like metal. Zeth gathers my wet hair in one hand and lifts it out of the way as he finishes placing something hard and solid around my neck.
A collar. It’s some sort of collar.
My blood feels like it’s boiling with adrenalin as I hear a firm and definitive click from behind me. Whatever this thing is, it’s now well and truly clasped around my neck.
“You can breathe, Sloane. It’s not tight.” Zeth brushes a hand down my front, skimming his fingers across my breasts. “Not until you want it to be.”
I inhale, realizing that he’s right—I’m holding my breath, and the collar isn’t actually tight. It fits snugly at the base of my neck, giving my windpipe plenty of room. Zeth surprises me then. He runs his hands down my front again, trailing demanding fingers over my breasts, down my stomach, slowly over my hipbones. He skims them across my buttocks, heading upward, and then travels up my spine. When he reaches my hands, which are still obediently where he told me to put them, held behind me, he laces his fingers through mine, holding one of my hands. The action is so intimate and reassuring that any lingering doubt over our little game vanishes in a puff of smoke. Even when he raises my arm a little higher up my back and I feel another press of cold metal and hear another series of clicks—a handcuff. The other wrist gets cuffed, too. I try to drop my arms so that they rest over my butt, but I get halfway and I can’t. My shoulder injury sings with pain, but it’s not enough to make me object. My hands remain lifted halfway up my back even as Zeth lets me go, held there by a tautness, connected from the handcuffs to the collar. There has to be a chain or something, connected between the two.
Zeth trails his fingers down the groove of my spine, making a hungry, humming noise. “Your skin is fucking amazing,” he says. “You’re like a statue of some fucking Greek goddess, made out of the most perfect marble.” His hands go to my hips, and then he’s firmly guiding me forward, pressing the whole length of my body against the wall. I have to turn my head, my cheek resting flat against the plasterwork, which brings my ear close to Zeth’s mouth. He moves forward, crushing himself up against me so that my pinned hands behind my back are filled with muscle and burning hot skin—his temperature’s still not quite right, but I think his elevated heat has more to do with the massive erection he’s jabbing into my ass cheeks than anything else. He slips a leg in between mine and pushes them open a little farther so that he has better access to what’s between them.
I’m already wet enough that he could thrust inside me right now and I wouldn’t complain. He doesn’t do that, though. Instead he slides a hand between my thighs, groaning a little when he feels how ready I am.