Fearless Read online

  Oh yeah, Ethen had ‘taught’ her all right.

  “I am safe,” he prodded her.

  All the pain he hadn’t seen in her reaction was right there, trembling in the whimper of her voice as she repeated, “I am safe.”

  The crack of the strap wrapped the base of her buttocks, hugging them in its painful embrace.

  Her breath caught again, but she didn’t so much as arch onto her toes. Anyone else would have been squirming. Noah frowned, not at all liking what he saw.

  “I am loved.” Her voice broke.

  There was no help for it, but to whip where he’d already struck.

  Her hands spasmed—her fingers snapping open, then clawing up tight again. She made no sound apart from a shaky exhale.

  What was it with doms who robbed their submissives of the cathartic freedom of expressing their pain in movement. Bucking, writhing, crying—there was beauty to be seen in the full wallow of the hurt as it engulfed them.

  “I-I-I d-don’t ha-have—” She blinked rapidly against the shine of rising tears.

  “To be afraid of anything,” he said, helping her through it, and swung.

  The crack of the strap filled the tiny room, sharp as a gunshot and the impact low enough to catch not only the lower swells of her bottom but the excruciatingly sensitive sit-spot as well.

  Kitty’s mouth gaped in the scream she refused to let out. Her ass and thighs shook, her will fighting back against the involuntary reaction of muscles locked in a fight for self-preservation.

  Noah touched her bottom again, offering caressing comfort as he checked her. He could feel the heat of her pain rising through the layers of already swelling flesh and the pale cloth of her panties. Bright swathes of crimson extended out beyond the hug of white elastic to stain both sides of her bottom and even down onto the tops of her thighs. That color marked the extent of his target, he would go no further than that. He didn’t need to.

  “This isn’t a punishment,” he reminded, cupping first one burning ass cheek and then the other. “This is a cleansing. Take all the time you need. We’ll continue when you say; it’s over when you say.”

  Kitty sucked a hard breath. Her mouth clamped shut against the scream she would not let escape. Her teeth gritted fast to swallow it back. Through them, she started the count over. “I’m a good girl!” she snarled, and burst into tears.

  He didn’t need the full force of his arm to make it hurt like hell, but the sound of impact made it sound as if he had.

  “I’m safe!” she shrieked, her perfect pose faltering under the tiniest hip twist. Her toes dug against the hardwood floor, scraping the wood as she fought not to squirm as the strap wrapped her ass in another fiery hold. “I’m loved!”

  She gave herself no time to recover, so neither did he.

  She screamed, “I don’t have to be afraid of anything!”

  He struck her sitspot directly and he spared her nothing.

  For the first time, she broke position. Her legs snapped together, her feet snapping up to cover her fiery red bottom. She sobbed. She also started over again, and so did he. He gave her what she needed, pausing only long enough to wait for her to put her feet down or move her hands when she forgot herself. Stroke after stroke, phrase after phrase, until she lost all articulation and could only garble those key words into bedding now soaked with tears. She never said her safeword. She never got up, or tried to crawl over the footrail. And though eventually he did take her to twisting and bucking and struggling in expression of the hurt that consumed her, she never once tried to fight the strap.

  He stopped when she was crying too hard even to mouth her phrases. Laying the strap on the floor, he hunkered down beside her, rubbing her back and stroking her hair. He caressed her bottom, measuring the hard spots where the swelling was the worst, but finding no blisters or split skin. He had lotion in the other room, but he was loathe to leave her long enough even to go get it. At least, not until her tears eventually dwindled into hiccups and sniffles.

  He had to help her over the footrail. She made no effort to crawl into his lap, which he wouldn’t have minded and, for a moment, almost regretted. But this wasn’t about him. So he helped her up far enough for her to collapse upon her pillows. Her face was hot and red. The moment she touched the pillows, sobbing, she melted into them.

  Brushing her dark, tussled hair back from her face, Noah checked, but her eyes were already closed. Already the sobs were breaking into gasps, and already those were easing into deeper, even breaths. She looked peaceful. A corner of his mouth lifted. She looked as if she were already sleeping.

  She was quite lovely like this. All that long brown hair and soft, pale skin, her pants still tangled around her ankles and her bottom on absolute fire. He took her shoes off, then her pants so she might be comfortable in the fiery aftermath. She didn’t rub her bottom once; Noah tried to resist, but he couldn’t help rubbing it for her.

  She mewed, the softest of protests. More a whimper really, but she didn’t try to stop him. What she did do, was roll less on her side and more on her belly, giving him full access to the hurt he’d inflicted, and now tried to soothe.

  He kept his touch on the summits of her cheeks. He did not dip his fingers down into the shadowy valley between her slightly parted thighs. Would he find her wet if he did, the way so many submissives became even when the pain was too much for them? His fingertips tingled to wander, but he stuck to his resolve until it became overwhelmingly clear that she was too much a temptation. The longer he fondled her, the more he ached to slip his hands beneath the elastic of her panties to feel the burning of her flesh directly against his palm, skin to skin. Flesh to flesh. Dom to sub.

  He took his hand off her. She was lying on the quilt, but he untucked it and folded the wide length up over her so she would be covered. She never once opened her eyes, so he left her there to sleep.

  Noah was almost out the door when he heard her mumble, “If that wasn’t punishment, I don’t ever want to make you mad.”

  The blood was pounding in his veins, the allure of her pulling him to come back to her. Maybe even to lie down beside her, roll her into his arms, comfort her tiny body with his. Only sheer force of will kept him from taking that first damning step.

  “I don’t punish when I’m angry,” he said, for the record. “I also don’t spank when it’s real. And no, love, you don’t want to know what my punishments are like.”

  Her only response was a sigh, seductively soft and filled with longing. She curled into her pillow, and Noah walked out the door while he still could.

  He closed it to give her privacy, feeling nothing but the rawness of his desire to go back inside. The low, throbbing ache of his fully erect cock, thrusting stiff against the front of his jeans. He looked down at himself.

  So much for his center of calm.

  God. If he weren’t so aroused, this would almost be embarrassing.

  Chapter 8

  Australia was nothing if not persistent. It waited a few days for the heat Noah had seared into her backside and all the tenderness of her strapping to fade, and then it tried to kill her again. This time, her imminent death took the form of the straggliest, grumpiest koala she’d ever seen.

  There was a world of difference, as it turned out, between being a burdensome guest, bound to the kindness of a keeper, and being a guest with an assigned task. Noah was right. She wasn’t a citizen, so she couldn’t get a job in his country. But the task Noah gave her served its purpose. It felt good to do something. To be ruled by the clock and another’s expectations. To be needed.

  Some might have thought it sexist and degrading to be commanded to care for his kitchen, but Kitty didn’t mind it, especially since Noah very quickly proved he didn’t go out of his way to make messes, he treated her with respect and he made zero sexual advances against her. Zero. She found that both comforting and, in a way, disappointing.

  On that first day, once she woke up from her nap, Kitty cleaned up after breakfas
t and scrubbed down the sink, counters and stove. She served a simple lunch of sandwiches at twelve. He was out at the time, so she put everything in the fridge and waited at the window, watching until she finally spotted him coming up from the barn around one. She had to hurry to get everything on the table before he entered the house and barely made it in time, but it felt good. Like, major accomplishment good. His simple ‘thank you’ made her ridiculously happy, too, though she hid all signs of it so he wouldn’t see. Past experience could be a cruel teacher, and she didn’t want him to say anything to ruin how she felt. No cutting criticism of what she could have done to make lunch better, what she might have forgot, and, if nothing at all was wrong with the food, then what might be wrong with her instead.

  In fact, she was so afraid of what he might say, that she tried to hide in the kitchen so she wouldn’t have to join him at the table.

  “Rule Number Nine,” he said from the kitchen doorway, smiling even as he tipped her a stern look. “We eat at the table together. Every meal. Every time.”

  It felt weird to sit with him, as if they were equals. Not only for breakfast, but again for lunch and then again when she got tea on the table at four, even though he’d told her not to. In fact, she’d sat at many an awkward table since she’d left Ethen, and so far, it hadn’t gotten any easier. It was hard to shake the belief she didn’t belong on a chair. It became even harder when she felt herself on the verge of doing kitten things, especially with Noah sitting right there. He liked to talk during meals, and he had a way of chatting that made her forget to watch her behavior, especially when getting up and down off her chair. She almost went to hands and knees twice at lunchtime. That was very scary, but by teatime, her concerns took a very different direction. That was when her stomach turned against her.

  After feeling perfectly fine for most of the morning and afternoon, the minute she took that first sip of tea, her stomach rolled, then heaved, sending Kitty dashing to the bathroom, where she then lived for almost two hours. Leaned up against the wall by the toilet, wishing she would either hurry up and die… or that Noah would. At least then, he’d stop fussing at her. But no, he brought her tea and crackers as fast as she threw it all up. He pulled her hair back from her face and rubbed her back through the worst of the heaving, and before it was fully over, he forcibly tucked her into bed with a bucket and made her stay there while he went into town and brought back burgers for dinner. The smell of it made her want to throw up all over again until, the clock having ticked beyond some magic point around seven, the crackers and tea finally overcame the nausea and she became ravenous.

  “Feel better?” Noah asked, as she came staggering out of bed. For the first time in a long time, she ate an entire hamburger in one sitting. She even ate the chips that came with it. The only thing she didn’t eat was the pregnancy test he set on the table by her plate.

  “I’m not pregnant.” She pushed the kit away from her and refused to touch it again. So there it sat, for several days like a silent accusation during each new bout of nausea, all of which struck in the afternoon, no matter what she did, only to magically end in the evening, leaving her ribs sore from heaving and her belly cramping with hunger… right up until Australia tried to kill her for the fourth time.

  It happened at the end of her first week. It was hot for late fall, or so Noah mentioned over breakfast. But to Kitty, it had been hot pretty much every day since she’d arrived. Not that Kitty felt much discomfort in the house. Noah’s air-conditioning was fantastic. The unnerving part came when she cooked and cleaned her way through both the kitchen and the day to accompanying scuttles of clawed feet on the porch outside. The koalas were coming down out of the trees to drink from the tub set out for them on the north side. It was such an unsettling sound, but so long as she didn’t look out the windows, she could pretend she was hearing nothing more threatening than farm dogs or barn cats moving about. If only she’d stuck to that—that non-window-peeping resolve—then she never would have been tempted to go outside.

  Except she did look. Especially when the fighting broke out. She’d never heard such squalling in her life—high-pitched baby-ish shrieks punctuated by deep, baritone belching, following by a lot of clattering and thumping as two or more beasts wrestled each other around the watering trough. It took a lot of neck craning to even catch a glimpse when they were banging into the side of the house, but the wrestling matches tended to end only when one finally knocked the other off the porch and into compliance. Victory was announced via the winner’s donkey-like burping, while the loser sat in a heap in the dust, crying like a thoroughly bitten human child. It was horrible and disconcerting and, as it turned out, all for naught, because the first time she noticed a winning koala dip its muzzle into the watering trough, she realized there was no water in it. The trough was bone dry.

  Filling that trough was Noah’s job and she knew for a fact that he’d already done it that day. She’d seen him on his way around the house while she was making the coffee. But then, it was hot. The koalas must have drunk it all already, which she supposed wasn’t entirely unbelievable. The trough was more of a metal pan. Not huge, only big enough to bathe a pug—or a koala—but not deep enough to drown one. Had Noah been up at the house, Kitty had no doubt he would have gone out and promptly filled the pan again. But he wasn’t. Like the last two days before, he’d gone down to the barn to do whatever it was that occupied him there, leaving Kitty alone in the cool comfort of the house. Cleaning, and listening to the awful burping of winning koalas, and the cries of losers.

  Kitty tried to ignore them, but within ten minutes, another grey beast with a beaked face crawled up onto the porch and the braying, shrieking, belching, baby-cry squalling escalated into wrestling all over again.

  Hiding in the house, Kitty listened with growing guilt. She knew what it was like to be thirsty. Being deprived of food and water was part of the punishment every time Ethen locked her in the box beneath his bed. He hadn’t let her out even to go to the bathroom, preferring instead to punish her for the inevitable mess she’d had no choice but to make and then lie in. As horrible as that had been, the thirst had been worse. It had been consuming. By the end, she’d been so desperate and so barren of any moisture in her mouth, nose and throat that her lips had split open and it hurt to breathe.

  Oh yes, she knew exactly what those koalas were going through. If she hadn’t, she never would have gone outside.

  Stepping out into the sunlit heat of the Australian outdoors was easily one of the most terrifying things she’d yet done in her life. It didn’t quite rank as high as the night she’d runaway, but it did deserve an honorable mention.

  The white-washed porch wrapped all the way around the house, giving her options on how best to attempt this. She crept to her right as far as the corner, but that was where the fighting marsupials were, wrestling and belching at one another, both on and off the porch, up on the railing and out in the yard.

  To her left, around the back corner and all down the west side of the house, things were much calmer until she reached the far north corner. Peeking around that, she saw her end destination: the watering trough. The problem was, there were koalas all over the place. Mostly in the trees, and some sitting in the yard. One very small one was sitting not three feet from the empty trough, idly scratching its leg. Its back was to her, its attention focused on a bigger male now belching his victory over the scuffle that had ended. If she could get to the faucet, she could turn the water on now while their attentions were mostly diverted and then she could run before she got bit, burped at, or attacked.

  Kitty’s heart was in her throat. Her legs were shaking, but she eased around the corner, sneaking as quiet as she could until she was close enough to bend down, stretch out her arm and tickle at the faucet handle with her fingertips. The little koala didn’t notice her. The big one, however, did. Its head turned, the beady black eyes locking on her. It might have been her imagination, but she could have sworn the ferocity of his d
onkey-braying belches intensified as he crawled towards her.

  Snagging the faucet, Kitty scrambled to turn it, but it was stuck. Shit! She stretched harder, grabbing it with her whole hand and twisting with all her panic and strength. A gush of water erupted into the dry metal pan, startling the little koala, who let out a baby-cry squeal and fell over. But that gush of water was like a dinner bell to a bunch of starving inmates, and to Kitty’s eye these weren’t cute, cuddly koala bears crawling straight at her from literally every direction. They were just plain mean.

  She would have run, but she never got the chance. As she tried to make her escape, the most straggly, beat-up, grey and brown animal with a vaguely koala-ish face crawled up onto the porch and put itself directly in her escape path.

  It came right at her at a pace reserved for sloths and snails, something that should in no way have been half as terrifying as it was. But it did it with beady-eyed malice and claws that scraped the weathered floorboards in ways that sent ice shocks stabbing up her spine. It screamed—that high-pitch baby-cry. So did she, for that matter, and it promptly charged straight past her to the water spewing from the faucet, as if Kitty weren’t even there.

  She barely escaped with her life, but she did escape. Racing back around the house, she flung herself through the front door and slammed it shut behind her. Collapsing against it, she sagged all the way to the floor, holding her panicking heart in her chest with both hands and fighting to catch her breath without bursting into tears.

  It couldn’t have been more than a few seconds later, but the door suddenly bumped her back.

  “Kitty?”

  She crawled far enough out of the way to let Noah into his own house. She hadn’t noticed the time, but he had to have been coming up from the barn while she’d been running for her life, screaming like a crazy woman. Judging by his look of concern, he’d seen her just fine.