In Flight (Up In The Air #1)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Mr. Withdrawn

My alarm went off. I turned it off quickly, trying not to disturb the sleeping man wrapped around me tightly. One of his hands was cupping my breast, even in deep slumber. He had apparently thawed out a bit in his sleep.

I pulled free of him slowly and with effort, padding softly into the bathroom to shower.

He was sitting up on my side of the bed when I re-emerged. He ran a hand through his hair when he saw me.

“Will you call me when you get home?” he asked.

I nodded, and went back to getting ready. He got dressed as well, though he didn’t pack his things. I suspected he was going to leave them there without asking me if it was okay. I decided not to make an issue of it. I didn’t want to rile him just then.

“I’m off for most of thursday. You know we don’t fly out until late in the evening,” I told him, trying to draw him out of his mood.

He just nodded, and I worried that I’d been too presumptuous, assuming he’d want to spend another day with me.

“I’ll come here again after you get off of work, unless you object to my company,” he said.

It was the closest he would get to asking, I thought.

“Sounds great.” I smiled at him, but he remained expressionless.

He was ready before me, but waited patiently, dressed in a pale gray suit, with a dark gray shirt and a crimson tie. It was beyond stunning to see him fully dressed after spending so much time with him nearly naked in my house.

“That’s a lovely suit,” I told him.

He thanked me for the compliment, but stayed withdrawn.

I realized that his withdrawal made me want to cling to him. I squelched the unhealthy urge.

He walked me out. He didn’t say goodbye until Stephan approached my open garage. James gripped the back of my head, giving me a hard kiss on the mouth.

“Call or text me the second you get back in town,” he told me gruffly, moving out of my way.

He didn’t get into his own car until we started to drive away.

Stephan gave me a careful look. “That man is intense,” he said quietly.

I heard the implied question there, but I just nodded. He was worried about me, but I still didn’t know James well enough to confidently reassure him that everything was fine.

Both of the flights we worked were agonizingly slow.

The only interesting thing about the day was that the Agents were back, following exactly the same routine that they had on the previous turn. Stephan reassured me that he would fill out another report on the strange behavior, just to cover bases, but we decided, after some debate, that the two men must be investigating the airline.

I didn’t call or text James during our short time on the ground. I wasn’t sure he wanted me to, so I decided to err on the side of caution. I had no missed calls or texts, so I figured that was the safest bet. Though my ear had picked up a strange line of conversation from one of the Agents as he was exiting the aircraft. “Yes, Sir, she is well. There were no problems. No one bothered her at all.”

I began to get an inkling of a paranoid idea, but I immediately brushed it off as batshit crazy.

Even eccentric, filthy rich people aren’t that insane, I told myself.

Agent #2, whose name on the manifest showed James Cook, gave me a warm smile when I handed him his fifth bottle of water.

“Here you go, Mr. Cook,” I said, smiling back. As strange as this pattern was, he was really a very pleasant passenger.

“Thank you, Ms. Karlsson,” he responded, and I froze. He would know my given name, but there was no reason in the world why he should know my surname. It wasn’t on my name tag.

I looked at him squarely. “How do you know my last name?” I asked him frankly.

He looked a little sheepish, as though it had been a slip. “It’s my job, Ma’am.”

I told Stephan of the exchange. He looked baffled. “Do you suppose we are being investigated?”

“I think it might be James…” I said quietly, revealing my paranoid theory.

Stephan grimaced. “I’d like to say that was impossible, but I can actually picture James doing something like this. Are you going to ask him?”

I sighed. “At some point. I’m not sure I want to deal with the answer. I’m not ready to break things off just yet.”

Stephan gripped my shoulder. “Breaking things off isn’t the only solution, Bianca.”

We stared at each other for a long moment, but I didn’t agree or disagree with him.

I texted James almost immediately when we landed in Vegas, turning on my phone while we taxied in.

Bianca: We’re back in Vegas. Taxiing in right now.

He responded almost instantly.

James: Good. I’ll be at your house when you get there.

And he was, not startling me this time when he stepped out of the dark SUV, since I recognized it now.

I waved goodnight to Stephan. James met me at my walkway, his hand going possessively to my nape. He was uncannily silent.

I let us in, kicking my shoes off at the door and putting my flight bag back in it’s spot on a small table by my bedroom door.

James was still a silent presence behind me. I felt a shiver of fear stroke down my spine. In this mood, would he really hurt me? What had I gotten myself into, becoming so intimate with such a stranger? Furthermore, becoming intimately violent. I had gone too far to go back. Hadn’t I?

I felt disgust with myself for even considering it. I would regret it if I never discovered what lay down this path, a path that had always secretly fascinated me. But the fear was strangely persistent with such a silent, cold man at my back.

My father had always done the most damage when he was done screaming and became the cold monster that haunted my nightmares. A picture of his expressionless face, covered in blood, flashed into my mind, making me shiver. His cold blue eyes flicking to me with an almost absent-minded warning. And how sick was I, that James, in his cold, dominant persona, was the most irresistible to me?

I made a note to get back in touch with my neglected therapist. But even with all of my dark musings and spine-chilling fears, I never even considered asking James to leave.

I wanted to face this, to feel brave when so often my bravery had fled me, and I had simply run in terror, leaving someone else to take the damage.

“Get on the bed. On your back.” James’s voice was hoarse when he finally spoke.

We had been standing in the dark for long minutes in total silence. I did it, and just the act of submitting made me relax a fraction in relief. It was all in his hands now.

“Lift up your skirt,” he told me. “More. All the way to your waist. Good.”

He turned on the light and approached me, dragging my hips to the edge of the mattress and positioning my heels there in what seemed to be his examination routine.

He knelt, his still, stony face lowering between my legs.

I shivered.

He made a little tsking noise when he saw the moisture there. He touched me, holding up two wet fingers.


“Is this all for me?” he asked blandly.

I swallowed and just nodded.

“I’d like a proper answer.”

“Yes, Mr. Cavendish,” I tried, not really knowing what he wanted.

“Tell me if you feel any tenderness at all,” he ordered, sliding a finger inside of me slowly. All of the soreness was gone, leaving only an achy pleasure, and I squirmed.

He slapped the side of my ass, hard. “Don’t move.” He continued to stroke me, touching every inch, circling his finger.

“So f*cking tight. Unbelievable,” he muttered. It was the closest to thawing that I’d witnessed from him since he’d gone cold at dinner the night before. A second finger joined the first, stroking along every part of my walls, looking for any rawness.

“Any soreness here?” he asked, shoving in deeper a little roughly.

I gasped. “No, Mr. Cavendish.”

He pulled out abruptly, still studying my sex.

“Good. Now I’m going to punish you. Go put that f*ck-me nightgown on.” He straightened as he spoke, and I watched in fascination as he sucked on his fingers, then loosened his tie.

“It’s dirty,” I told him. It was on the floor of my closet.

“It’s about to get filthy. Go put it on.”

I did, hanging my work clothes up with shaking hands.

When I came back out of my closet, he had taken only his jacket and tie off, rolling up the sleeves of his dress shirt. His arousal was obvious in his snug, pale gray slacks. And his eyes were still chips of ice.

“Get on the bed, face down. Put your hips directly on the wedge in the center of the bed.”

I noted the strange pillow on the bed only when he mentioned it, but I complied without a word. It was like a miniature version of the ramp he’d used in his house. Travel-sized, I thought.

My head snapped up as I felt a rope being tightened around my wrists. He was bending over the bed, binding them together. My bed didn’t have a real frame, just a flimsy headboard, but James was prepared for that, using a long rope and tying it completely around the underside of the bed to hold my wrists in place.

I watched him a little numbly. Being bound for the second time should have been less terrifying, not more so, but my mind just wouldn’t process that information.

“Do you remember your safe word?” he asked. He dropped to his knees to rig the rope under the bed casually, as though it was the most normal thing in the world. He even managed to look dignified while he did it, totally unruffled by having to crawl around on his knees.

“Yes, Mr. Cavendish,” I answered, trembling.

He tied my feet efficiently, pulling them slightly apart rather than together.

I tried to turn my head to look, but he covered my eyes with a black blindfold, tying it snugly. I wanted desperately for him to touch my face, any sign of affection, but he remained stoic and cold as he prepared me for punishment.

Soft music began to play from the small speakers that my phone plugged into. It was unfamiliar music, but beautiful, a woman’s voice singing a haunting melody accompanied heavily by violins.

I could feel him simply staring at me for long minutes after he’d finished tying me. I squirmed a little.

“Mr. Cavendish, please,” I implored him. For what, I wasn’t entirely certain. He didn’t respond.

I gasped when a hand finally touched me, touching the back of my thigh lightly. He lifted my nightgown up from mid thigh to my shoulders. I heard some rustling. Cloth? Something thicker. And then another touch. It felt like his hand, though not like his skin. Had he put on a glove?

Several more minutes ticked by in an agony of waiting, and all I knew was that he watched me.

The first strike caught me by surprise, a harsh slap from his gloved hand to my butt. I gasped. It hurt. I could feel one of his thighs touching mine as he leaned in close to my side. The first hit was followed by another slap to a spot just below, and then he began in earnest, hit after hit on every inch of my butt and thighs.

I gasped and shifted a little, trying in vain to get away from the harsh contact.

Why does his hand hurt so much more than the riding crop? I wondered. He must have been holding back a lot before. But he wasn’t holding back now.

I lost track of the number of quick-fire slaps, my mind going into a kind of numb state that was all too familiar but seemed to be changing inexorably into something else…

He hadn’t even paused in the blows when I heard him gasp and curse. Suddenly, he was shoving into me, burying himself to the hilt with one brutal stroke. I was so wet that it didn’t hurt, and I clenched deliciously around him. The fullness felt overwhelming for a moment, though, and I screamed, a sound that none of his slaps had solicited from me.

I was in an oasis of pleasure amidst all of the pain as he started pumping inside of me relentlessly. He worked hard at it, my tight passage fighting him with it’s involuntary clenching.

He grabbed my hair with both fists, pulling my head up as he thrust.

“Come,” he said in the roughest voice I’d ever heard out of him. His cock dragged along just the perfect spot as he pulled out of me, and I came with a scream. He didn’t stop, didn’t even pause, grinding against me with ragged, intoxicating gasps.

He brought me to orgasm twice more before I felt him emptying inside of me with a harsh groan. He leaned along my back, covering me completely, his mouth at my ear. He was still thrusting in a small motion inside of me, even spent, as though he couldn’t stop.

“My Bianca,” he whispered into my ear raggedly.

He lay on top of me like that for long minutes, still buried inside of me, his lips against my neck now, kissing me softly. He seemed to have exercised all of that cold fury out of his body, and I was left again with the tender lover.

He lifted himself from me eventually, examining me with light fingers. My thighs and butt were sore to the touch. He fingered my sex, wet now from both of us.

“Tender?” he asked in a hoarse voice.

“No, Mr. Cavendish,” I answered from my sightless position. He thrust two fingers inside of me.

I wriggled and gasped.

“I wonder how many times I could make you come in one night,” he mused idly. “You’re such a hair trigger. I’d test you, but I think you’d pass out before you asked me to stop.”

I thought he might be right.

He spread something cool and soothing along every part of me that he had hit, applying it with the softest touch.

He untied me eventually, and I lay there passively until he turned me onto my back, pulling my blindfold off.

He arranged me on my back, even fanning my hair out above me, staring at me with the softest eyes, a stark contrast to those glacial eyes that had studied me coldly when we’d entered the room. “You’re an exquisite angel, Bianca. I’ve never touched anything so fine in my life.”

My eyes were growing heavy as he bent down and kissed me reverently on the forehead. He was still fully dressed, with just his slacks undone.

“Now go to sleep, Love.”