Her Beast: A Dark Romance (Beauty and the Captor Book 1) Read online

  “Very good, Pet,” he whispered next to my ear as I came back down.

  The intensity of my arousal now past, what I’d done, how I’d spurred it on was like a thousand drops of humiliation all raining down on me in the aftermath.

  “Unfortunately, why you’ve kept your pussy to yourself is not the only lie you told, is it?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I sobbed. I really didn’t.

  “You said you’ve never let a man play with your pussy. But you let me, didn’t you?” he whispered slyly as he reached for the belt.

  I opened my mouth to protest, but remembering the way I’d welcomed his touch, not just now but the last time as well when he’d spanked me, I slammed it closed. But I yanked hard on the restraints at the same time, trying futilely to escape.

  He couldn’t do this. He was the one who’d made my body respond like that. I hadn’t wanted it. It wasn’t my fault. And my fault or not, with my body’s arousal sated and my backside still stinging from his belt, this was only going to hurt. Badly.

  “Stop. No. Don’t,” I yelled, but it didn’t faze him.

  He brought the belt down with another resounding thwack, and the pain radiated down to my toes.

  Again, but this time there was something else in the pain, a kindling spark.

  One more, and when the lash of fire jerked my hips forward and pressed my clit against the post, I held myself there, feeling the spark burst into a flame. It was depraved and mortifying, but it was also the only way to turn the pain into something else, something even hotter than the fiery sting of my backside.

  Two more, and I started to rub wantonly against the post. I couldn’t stop what he was doing to me, but I could use it. I could use my body’s sick pleasure to escape the pain.

  He dropped the belt after two more strikes, and when he reached up to the restraints, I thought he was finally finished with me.

  But again, I was wrong.

  He spun me around until I was facing him and hooked the restraints there. I was breathing heavy, but not out of my mind with arousal, still sane enough that I tried to object when he knelt down in front of me and lifted my foot off the ground. When he lowered it onto his shoulder, I tried to yank it away, but he held it firm. And then he leaned in until he was just a hair’s breadth away.

  I could fight him—not that it would amount to anything. I could feel his warm breath on my moist flesh. Did I want to fight him?

  As if my body was answering for itself, my hips jerked forward and his mouth pressed against my clit. I could hear him chuckling, but then his tongue flicked across the sensitive nub, and I didn’t care.

  He flicked back and forth, fast, and my body started to writhe. I felt the oddest need to touch him—to feel his flesh beneath my fingers, to twine them in his hair and hold him close against my sex. But handcuffed, all I could do was stand there and watch as his mouth did wicked things, flicking, sucking and nipping at me until the world narrowed once more to his mouth and the wildfire he was feeding with everything he did.

  When he sent me over the edge this time, I could feel the blissful waves of my orgasm from my fingertips to the tips of my toes.

  He looked up at me, his lips glistening, but it wasn’t his lips that caught my attention. It was his eyes. Vivid, blue eyes. Comforting eyes in a man who was anything but a comfort. Why? And why did they seem so god damned familiar?

  He stood, and I waited for him to mock me, or touch me, or spank me, or whatever else he had in mind. But he just unshackled me and left. He walked out of the room without a word.

  5

  Derek

  She was beyond exquisite. Hell, I couldn’t put a name to what she was. Her unique response to being touched, to being disciplined was beyond arousing, and it meant she might just be ready for sale a whole lot earlier than I’d expected. The revenge I’d sought, craved, for years, it was within my grasp now. Though she was stubborn, her innate desires and the way she seemed to despise them would help to break her down.

  When I’d first laid eyes on her, I’d thought it might have taken months to make her ready, but there was no way I could have known what was lurking beneath the surface. And just four weeks in, she would be ready in a few more weeks at most.

  The problem was, the last thing I wanted to do was give her away—a problem I’d never encountered before. Even back when Marcos had introduced me to training slaves, I was always anxious to be rid of them, at first out of guilt, and then eventually, out of boredom.

  But I wasn’t bored, not yet. I was curious though. Sexy, beautiful…and wound up way too tight. She seemed to have genuine difficulties with her sexuality, and that could prove to be a bit of a stumbling block if she held onto it too tight.

  But why? Where had they come from? A thought occurred to me, and then it enraged me. I imagined her reluctance had something to do with being forced earlier in life—like by a father. The white, hot rage that coursed through my veins surprised me. To think that her father had used her like that…I already wanted Donovan dead, but right then, death wasn’t good enough.

  I scoffed at myself—I’d kidnapped her, was in the process of turning her into a slave, and I was filled with rage over the thought of her father touching her, or making her touch him? That was a new kind of fucked up thinking, even for this monster. But since I couldn’t quite get it to calm down enough to bring her dinner, I decided to do a little research, digging up what I could find about how she’d spent the time since being taken from the foster home.

  Not much, it turned out—because there wasn’t much to tell. I’d located a storage unit in her name before I’d had her abducted, and had the contents brought to me, and that had her apartment inspected after her disappearance. Three boxes. That’s all there was. The sum of her life.

  I looked through the books at the top of the stack—high school yearbooks. She was there but never smiling. Her eyes were sad, lost like she’d seemed the day I’d watched her. And no one ever wrote in her yearbook. The comments pages were blank.

  There was a picture of a woman beneath the yearbooks in the box—a woman who looked very much like her. Her mother, I presumed by the physical similarities. Thinking about it now, the girl looked nothing like James Donovan.

  There was only one photo of the woman who had to be her mother, and the picture was worn like it had been handled over and over again for years. I imagined her holding it to her chest every night when she went to bed as a little girl, hiding it underneath her pillow come morning to keep her father from finding it.

  There were books—a lot of books. Apparently, she liked to read—a lot. How I knew they weren’t her father’s, I didn’t know, but somehow it fit. With so few friends that her yearbook pages were empty, I imagined she spent a lot of time on her own, reading.

  At the bottom of the third box, I found a journal—a locked journal—and it had me curious. So, of course, I broke the lock and looked inside.

  A quick scan through showed that it covered several years—from a few months after she’d been taken up until the end of high school.

  I felt like I was violating her somehow—ha!—but I looked at the first entry, which was messier than the later ones. She wrote about moving again—the third time since her daddy came to get her. That meant she couldn’t have been more than nine or ten years old when she’d written it. She wrote that she didn’t like moving so much, but at least it was sometimes better than being in the foster home. Her daddy didn’t come into her room at night. In fact, her daddy didn’t touch her at all, not like Mr. Vaughan did.

  Fuck! I knew that name. I knew it because it was my father’s name.

  She’d lived with my family for nearly a year. My parents had been good people—I’d thought they’d been good people—taking in foster children as far back as I could remember, and she’d been one of those children.

  I re-read the journal entry and then read it again. I couldn’t believe what she’d written. It had to be a lie. But what
reason did she have to lie in a locked journal that I was quite certain no one else had ever seen? My father had gone into her room at night. He’d touched her—an eight-year-old girl. And I’d had no fucking idea. How many times? What had he done to her? And how the hell had I never noticed what was going on?

  Ignoring the way my blood had begun to boil, I kept reading. And then I wished I hadn’t. There was apparently one thing she did miss from her foster care, according to her younger self—me.

  “I miss Derek,” she’d written bluntly as nine-year-olds were apt to do. “I liked him.”

  Reading it sent a jolt of something acutely painful through my chest. I could vaguely remember the times the little redhead had bugged to sleep in my room, and I’d told her no, thinking it was the right thing to do. My parents wouldn’t have approved, no matter how innocent it was. How many times had I sent her back to her room…to my father?

  I felt nauseous and angry, but it was directed inward this time, and I had no idea what to do with it. I should have known, or asked, or done…something. Rage coursed through my veins, and I wanted to hurt the man who’d hurt her, but there wasn’t a god damned thing I could do about it. My father was dead and had been for a very long time.

  And it was for that death, and for the death of my mother, that I’d been hell-bent on seeking revenge since I was thirteen years old. What the hell was I supposed to do now? Donovan had broken into my home, shot my father point-blank in the forehead, then my mother, and then he’d run out of the house with his daughter beneath his arm.

  With no other family, I had been sent to hell, to the care of the vilest people I’ve ever known. If it hadn’t been for Marcos, I would have spent many more years there, locked in a dirty basement, a half-starved punching bag for the asshole and a whore for the bitch.

  Was I just supposed to forget about it all because of what my father may or may not have done? Let bygones be bygones? It just wasn’t in the repertoire of things I could do.

  But for the first time since that horrid night, I hesitated. Maybe Donovan still deserved to die, but his daughter? Did she deserve the fate I’d set out for her? But what choice did I have? Marcos already had a buyer—he was in the process of arranging the deal. I couldn’t back out. It just wasn’t done.

  He might not kill me if I set the girl free, but he’d make sure she wasn’t free for long. And while he wouldn’t kill her, he’d make her wish she was dead. The only thing I could do was make sure she was trained. Make sure she was equipped with what a slave would need to survive her new master. And then perhaps, when her buyer tired of her, I could buy her back, though freedom might mean very little to her by then.

  Fuck!

  Against my better judgment, I turned my attention back to the journal and flipped through the pages. The entries were sporadic, usually several months between them. She talked about me less and less until about halfway through when I stopped seeing my name altogether. But halfway—for years after she’d been taken, she’d thought about me. Damn.

  The last few entries were late in her high school years. What she wrote about most was a dream she’d been having recurrently, one that obviously made her uncomfortable, though she provided no details until the second to last entry. And then I understood why it had bothered her. Taken, punished, forced to submit, to perform, over and over again. She couldn’t understand why the dream kept coming. And worse, she couldn’t understand why she responded the way she did, why she couldn’t get it out of her mind or why it set her body on fire.

  Fuck me.

  No wonder she’d been unable to stop her body from responding to the things I’d done to her—they were what she’d fantasized about for years!

  Reluctantly, but unable to stop myself, I turned to the last entry, and it was the same, elaborating on the same fantasy that played in her mind night after night, but there was one more thing. One little detail that had me rock hard in three seconds flat.

  “I never know who it is,” the entry read, “but the eyes; they’re always the same, and there’s something so familiar about them, comforting. Unique. Vivid blue. Vivid blue. Blue…blue…blue,” she wrote over and over again down the length of the page as if she’d been racking her brain for an answer, for the owner of those eyes.

  It was cocky to presume, but it wasn’t. I hadn’t really paid attention to how much time she’d spent looking at me—at my eyes, specifically—but it fits now. Some part of her recognized me, and she’d been trying desperately to figure out how.

  But that also meant she’d been having naughty fantasies about me? For years? What the hell?

  I slammed the journal closed and tossed it in the box at my feet. This was insane. But part of me didn’t think so. A large, throbbing part of me wanted to barge into her room and give her exactly what she’d been fantasizing about because from the moment I’d spied her on the street, she’d been the only fantasy occupying my thoughts.

  I couldn’t do it though. I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t let her mess with my head like this. Instead, I focused on the other content of the boxes—books. Lots of books.

  I took a couple of them, figuring I’d hold onto them to give her back as rewards. Usually, I wouldn’t allow outside media unless it helped to advance a slave’s training—like BDSM erotica. But I found myself wanting to do something, to make amends for the plan I’d set in action.

  Yeah—a book was just the thing to make up for taking away a girl’s freedom and turning her into a slave.

  Nothing was going to make up for it. She would come to obey me, and she’d already demonstrated that her body responded to me, but deep down, she’d hate me. Always.

  And that was the reality check I’d needed. I wasn’t the Derek of her fantasies, however dark they might be. A long time and a lot of shit had happened since I’d been that Derek. And there was one man ultimately responsible for all of it—her father. And he had to pay.

  I wasn’t certain I could feel remorse anymore, but something akin to it hit me. I didn’t want to use her like this, but I didn’t have a choice. The plan had been laid, and I would do what was expected of me. I would turn the most enticing woman I’ve ever known into the most appealing slave a master could desire.

  I left her alone until the next morning. It was a small favor and a punishment at the same time—though I didn’t know precisely what I was punishing her for. Making me care? Was that even possible? Or was I just off my game with my revenge so close and thrown off by the discoveries in her journal?

  Still, the few hours to herself wasn’t likely to set her training back any given that she was still cloistered in the room by herself, but it would give her mind and body a rest. A break before I did my damnedest to break her.

  And I would succeed. I always did.

  Leaving her alone though wasn’t entirely a gift. It always seemed to me that leaving her alone was in a way a worse punishment to her than a spanking. The way the tension seemed to leave her body when I walked in when it should have been skyrocketing higher; how she leaned into my hand when I caressed her cheek—all signs that the solitude was like torture to her.

  Morning now, I opened the door and stepped inside. The sigh of relief she didn’t know I saw when I walked into the room did strange things to me. It made me imagine for just a moment she was glad to see me, and not that she was just glad to not be left alone in her cage. Maybe she worried I’d forget about her and leave her there to starve? Or maybe she was so starved for human companionship that even the monster I was, was better than no one at all.

  I fed her breakfast, pleased that she didn’t fight me, and then it was time to start pushing her hard. She needed to be well-prepared, and after reading through that god damned journal, I wanted this over with as quickly as possible.

  “Get in the shower, pet,” I told her when I’d placed the lid back on the tray.

  She hesitated—the first time that morning—but too quickly, she did as she was told, following on her knees behind me while I considered her ab
normally cooperative behavior at the moment. It was clearly an act, but to what end? Given her uniqueness, I wasn’t quick to jump to any conclusion. Of course, it was entirely possible—and most likely—that she was hoping her good behavior would result in me leaving quickly.

  However, she didn’t actually like being left alone, and her hot, little body certainly enjoyed my company. So, it was possible she was only trying to avoid giving me a reason to punish her. If so, I was more than happy to find out just how far she’d go to avoid the belt or a spanking—both of which shot a jolt of arousal to my cock at the thought.

  For the first time though, there was a pang of guilt there with it. And it was time to shut that useless emotion down. I couldn’t set her free, even if I wanted to, which right now, with her naked and on her knees in front of me, I had no desire to do. And that meant the only option was to make sure she was ready. It was far kinder than going easy on her when that would only lead to her suffering greatly at the hand—and whip—of her new master. And if my cock happened to benefit from the training she would need, where was the harm in that?

  She stopped in front of the shower and I turned on the facet. “Get in and use the soap in the corner,” I instructed her then, though it was unnecessary. I could tell by the light, floral scent of her skin that she’d showered a multitude of times on her own since arriving here. Of course, she’d never had to do it in front of me, and I was looking forward to the show.

  She stepped beneath the showerhead and I watched as water cascaded down her slender curves. When she’d squeezed the soap into her hands, she rubbed them together and then started at her neck, working her way across ‘safe’ zones, like her shoulders and down her arms.

  “Stop,” I said when she moved down to her stomach, and I stepped forward and squeezed the soap into my own hand. “Turn around,” I told her and her eyes flew to mine. I cocked an eyebrow and she pressed her lips together hard, but she complied.