Ah. She’d decided to participate. He studied her sweet body. The anticipation might just kill him.
“My earliest memory? I remember running down a forest pathway. My friend, Francine, ran beside me. We used to play hide and seek. She was darn good at that. Too good.” She raised her head, stared at him, as if daring him.
As if he’d not follow through. He put the strawberry to her mouth. She parted those soft lips and sucked in the redness, chewed and swallowed. He let his finger trail into the hole created by those lips and imagined his cock there. “I think, after all, you should do this. Pull them to your knees.”
And at last, finally, she was talking.
She put her hands to her waist, and slowly, teasingly, she shimmied the leggings down until they bunched at her knees. No underwear. The golden triangle of hair greeted his gaze. Now that was worth seeing.
“Your question?” He found another strawberry.
“What happens after?”
“This time it’s a secret.”
“Hmph.”
He cocked his head. How he liked messing with her. One of the perks of being the dom. Keeping the submissive off-kilter was at least half the fun. Too predictable, and things got boring. He never, ever, wanted boring. Neither would she.
She sucked in her bottom lip. A nervous habit. One he could count on. The more he understood her, the better. “You won’t tell me?”
“No.” He shook his head.
“Then I should make it a hard question. Why did you not listen to Dankyo when he told you to…dispose of me?”
Oh, now that was some question.
“Because, though I listen to Dankyo, I trust my own instincts even more. I don’t think, even now, that you’re a danger to me. How could anyone who’d do this be a risk?” He smiled. “Take off your bustier.”
He fed her the strawberry and ate some fruit himself while she opened the buckles on the jacket to get at the bustier, then undid the gold hooks and took it off. Her breasts, round and inviting, swung free. The nipples shrank, wrinkling up into perky pinkish buttons.
“My question.” He found a small bunch of red grapes, examined Claire, naked apart from the opened jacket, all the way from her knees up. Too tempting. He put a hand above the twisted cloth at her knee and ran it up toward the delicious territory between her legs where the light tuft of pubic hair came to a point.
*
Claire found her breath stilled in her throat as she waited for his hand to get to where she wanted it to be. Her clit and vulva had acquired heartbeats of their own. Yet he didn’t caress her there; instead his fingers combed lightly through her pubic hair while the fingers of his other hand traced their way to an areolae…again, not quite touching the center.
“Claire?”
She opened eyes she’d not known she’d closed. Damn, the man was smirking at her, or near enough.
“What are you most afraid of?”
She flinched, felt herself come down from the isolated world of pleasure she’d inhabited.
“Claire? I understand that’s an even harder question than yours.” He put a hand on her knee. She focused on that. “Maybe, just this once, I’ll let you reserve that one. Answer later. Would you like a different question?”
Would I? But I’m afraid of so many things. Myself, to start with. This was a trade-off. Hand him her heart and soul on a platter, and he’d what? Give her great sex? No, she belittled what he offered. “Claire?”
She looked at him. Kind, gentle when she needed him to be, twice her body weight, and he wanted to tie her up and spank her. Whew. And just the thought of that made her squirm, made her want to both climb all over him and run the opposite way.
“You’ll give me a different question?”
“If you want. But you get to answer it later today.” His hand on her knee squeezed.
She screwed up her face. “No. I’ll answer. I understand why you need honesty. Even if I hate talking about things like this.” She huffed. “I guess…I’m afraid of being lost, of having no home, nowhere to go. Of not being me.” She couldn’t keep the misery from her words. This topic was so close to the core of sadness in her. Even in the midst of desire, she felt the worst of it. And now, I’m afraid of losing you, because really, what I just said makes me sound like the most useless sort of person.
His arms enfolded her, and he pulled her tight into his chest. “Thank you,” he said softly. “Shh. It’s okay.”
He didn’t think she was something awful? She crumpled a bit and slid her arms around him, put her face into his shoulder. Solid. Nice. For a while it was enough to sit and be comforted; then slowly she remembered her ass was bare, for Theo had glided his hand down, feeling her between the cheeks of her bottom.
“Hey,” she whispered huskily, turning her head up.