Love Bound Read Free Page B

April saw his broad
shoulders, his powerful chest beneath his white cotton shirt. His eyes gleamed
with a hunger that combined with her total helplessness to bring her emotions
to a sudden, seething boil.
    “In all my years of work, I’ve never
met anyone like you, April,” he said. “I have seen women in every type of
sexual distress, but never anyone with your level of complete, consuming
arousal. Are you aware of that? Are you aware of how special that is?”
    April couldn’t speak. A warm lethargy
seemed to be taking possession of her limbs. She knew what she needed now: the
feel of his hand on her sex, the pressure of his body against hers holding her
tight, and yet that was not all she felt. The manacles on her wrists were like
a lover’s hands, holding her against her will, exposing her body to whatever
depredations he might wish to inflict on her, and suddenly she found a part of
her mind wishing for the most cruel and delicious tortures to be applied to
her. Just what, she didn’t know, but she ached to feel some wild and violent
sensation, some physical version of what she saw in his eyes.
    He turned and walked to a massive
wooden armoire, which he opened wide. Inside April could just glimpse various
things hanging within: implements of leather and chromed steel, black and
silver gleaming in the glow of the subdued gaslight. The Doctor selected a
black riding crop, thin and wicked, and laid it on the table, and April felt a
sudden thrill of delicious fear in the pit of her stomach.
    “I could have made you come in the
carriage,” He closed the doors and picked up the crop, hefting it in his hands.
    “‘Come,’” he said. “Are you familiar
with that word? It means to orgasm. And that’s what you need so desperately, my
dear: to come. And yet with a girl of such ardent temperament as yourself, I’m
afraid such relief would have been minor and very short-lived. The roots of
your sexual need go deep, very deep indeed, and to satisfy them, we must coax
them to the surface. We must bring out the sexual animal that lives inside you,
Miss Carnovan, bring her out into the light and force her into bloom like a
rare and exotic orchid, that we may pluck it at its very moment of ripeness. Do
you understand?”
    The girl’s eyes were wide and staring,
her lips parted and to dry for speech. Her breasts heaved with her deep but
steady breathing, pressing against a bodice that seemed suddenly much too tight
and confining.
    The Doctor smiled. “No, perhaps you
don’t. But you will. And you will trust me, April, that what I am about to do
is for your own good.”
    She watched him approach, her gaze
flicking from his hypnotic eyes to the whip in his hand. She felt her legs
begin to tremble again with an excitement she couldn’t explain, and her stomach
seemed to turn to liquid within her body. The Doctor came up to her and reached
out, seized hold of her hair and pulled her head back in a savage grip. He cut
off her sudden gasp of surprise by sealing her mouth with his lips.
    His kiss was fierce and possessive
like pure electricity, and she almost swooned at the unexpected force of his
passion. She couldn’t know that the drug he had slipped into her drink was
helping sap her will, making her even more a slave to her body’s wild and
forbidden desires which now surged unchecked through her blood with each beat
of her fevered heart; but neither had she expected to feel this kind of
desperate desire and consuming passion she felt from him, coming off him like
animal heat. She had thought that she was the one who was out of control, who
was barely able to contain her violent needs, but now she realized that he was
every bit as excited as she was, and the idea that her own desire could inflame
a man to this level of passion was almost more than she could bear. She felt
weak; her hold on her very consciousness was slipping away.
    But just when she felt herself falling
into the swooning haze of her own illicit desires,