The room swung around her as he turned and walked back to the hallway. “Keep bratting, my little kitten. The night is young.”
The fourth bedroom upstairs had been turned into a bathroom when indoor plumbing had been installed in the farmhouse nearly a century before. Thus, it waslargefor a bathroom.
Blaze held her with his shoulder digging into her stomach under her ribs with one hand and, as she saw in the mirror, stroked his chin with his other like a diabolical villain.
Yeah, he was a villain, having started their acquaintance by threatening her life, then kidnapping her, and then dragging her to New York City to meet her darned brother who’d been every bit as dastardly as her father had insisted her whole life. “Blaze, you need toput me downright—yikes!”
He swiveled back and forth, looking around the bathroom with the white clawfoot tub and pedestal sink on one wall and swinging her head around as he twisted. “What shall we do first?”
“Stop it! Stop flinging me around!You’re not the boss of me!”
He released his hands.
Sarah slid down the corrugated washboard of his front, but she missed landing on her feet and crumpled to a lump on the floor.
Blaze leaned down, his eyes intense as he pinned her with his gaze to the floor. “Oh, yes, I am the boss of you, and we’re going to have to make sure you know that. First, tell me your safeword.”
“Red,but I’m not saying it because you shouldn’t be—Ah!”she shrieked.
He’d grabbed her wrists and plucked her whole body off the floor like she was a limp bunny dangling by its ears. He said, “Naughty little kitten.”
A batch of those silken ropes hung over his other wrist. She hadn’t even seen them on his arm. He caught them and flipped loops over her wrists that he pressed together, tying her hands flat against each other over her head with a neat row of knots.
“Dang, how did you—you shouldn’t be manhandling me this way!”
“I’ll manhandle you any way I want.” He bent and smiled a sultry grin at her. “Indeed, it’s what I do best, handling you like a man.”
Warmth flushed all the way down her body, jiggling her legs. With her hands tied over her head like this, she couldn’t stop him from doing anything he wanted.
He could doabsolutely anything.
Her breath caught in her chest like she was hyperventilating, and the stroke of his fingers down her arm made her writhe in the bonds of the rope.
He held her hands over her head and stepped forward, dragging her heels over the wooden floorboards, and he hung a loop attached to the rope around her wrists on a robe hook bolted to the wall, one that Sarah knew was screwed tightly into a stud.
Her toes barely touched the floor, and she couldn’t balance. She twisted, looking at the bindings above her head and her bare toes dancing on the wooden planks.
Blaze stepped back, surveying his handiwork and her predicament with fire in his eyes. “You’re so beautiful when you’re helpless.”
“I’mnothelpless!”
He slid his hand behind her neck and bent, kissing her.
As his lips caressed hers, every bit of anxious zinging in her muscles drained away. She drooped, her shoulders relaxing and her toes lowering to the balls of her feet.
All she had to do was let go of the tension bunching her shoulders and back, and she could balance.
In the darkness of her closed eyes, his mouth gently sucking on her lips drew all her mind and soul, and she opened her mouth for his tongue to brush and then stroke hers.
When he withdrew, she might have fallen forward, except that she was still tied to the wall. Her wits meandered with the blood rushing through her heart until they returned to her, and she gasped air because she didn’t seem to have breathed recently and sputtered, “I amnothelpless. I’mnot.”
With a mischievous glint in his pale eyes, he reached over and slipped the top button of her shirt through its buttonhole.
The cotton fabric relaxed where it had been tight across her chest from her arms raised over her head.
He said, “You’re helpless,” and popped the second one.
“I’mnot,and this isinappropriate!”
