Page 17 of His Prize
“Hey,” I snapped, which had him jerking his head back to look right at me. “None of that. Stop beating yourself up. That’s my job.”
Darby’s mouth twitched, like his instinct was to grin at the joke, but he couldn’t quite manage it.
“But that’s the point,” I went on, guessing where his thoughts were going from the emotion that flickered through his eyes. “You agreed to test the auction concept because you wanted someone like me to beat your ass the way you think you deserve.”
Darby sucked in a juddering breath. “Yes, sir.”
I grinned, even though I didn’t think he was making a joke.
“I’ve got news for you, boy,” I said, feeling my way back into a dynamic that felt right and comfortable for both of us. “Even if I lashed every inch of you to that St. Andrew’s cross out there and bloodied your back with a single-tail whip, even if I bound you so tight that you could barely breathe and fucked you hard enough to rearrange your insides, even if I stuck my cock down your throat and held it there until you passed out from lack of oxygen, it wouldn’t take that bad feeling in you away.”
Darby’s face crumpled and contorted into guilty misery.
“All those people put their trust in me,” he sighed, back to being deeply upset in an instant. “Their lives are in my hands. I can’t let them down, or actual lives will be lost. Actual lives almost were lost.”
“Because your teammates let you down,” I said firmly, tightening my grip on his wrists to keep him pinned. “Because they dumped a shitload of work on you out of spite. Whetherthey were goofing off or seriously trying to undermine you, it was wrong.”
Darby shook his head, thrashing as he did. “I’m the supervisor. It’s my job to manage my team. If they slacked off, it was because I didn’t do my job.”
“You can’t make a poor player into the star of the match,” I said. “Just like you can’t make a star player with natural talent stink up the whole field. But even a superstar has bad days now and then.”
Darby made a sound between a huff and a sob. “I’m hardly a superstar.”
“Well, you’re a superstar sub, if you ask me.”
Darby laughed. Even though it was short-lived, it made me smile.
“I love subbing,” he admitted quietly. “I love how helpless and powerless it makes me feel. I love having an alpha hurt me and pleasure me for his own enjoyment. It makes me feel so alive.”
A thousand questions jumped instantly to my mind. What had Darby’s past relationships been like? Was he in one now but playing on the side? Had he been neglected as a child? Popular in school? Were most of his friends omegas or betas? What was his family like? There were a million different reasons people got kinky. Maybe kink just tickled Darby’s fancy. But I suspected it was a way for him to reach for something more that he wasn’t getting from a vanilla life.
“I think another heat wave is starting,” he panted under me, his hips squirming, like he was trying to move into position to be bred. “Those Heat Lightning pills really pack a punch.”
“Have you ever taken one before?” I asked.
He shook his head and let out a moan.
The sound and his movements had my alpha roaring and restless. Omega heat hormones were the most powerful drugknown to alphas. I’d heard a rumor that a team of research scientists had been working on pills that would give alphas the effect of omega heat hormones without being with an omega, but it had turned them so aggressive and rapacious that they’d immediately ended the program.
I could certainly understand that.
“Mmm,” I hummed, breathing in his rich scent as I bent to bury my face against the crook of his neck. “Ripe omega. My favorite.”
I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to play with Darby. That was why we were both here, after all. I wanted to play with him in more ways than an average Dom/sub fantasy, too. Maybe going full soft-Dom wasn’t the answer, but there were other scenarios that might give us both what we needed.
“Right,” I said, pulling back suddenly and kneeling between Darby’s open legs. “I paid a million dollars for your ass, and I intend to use you until I get my money’s worth.”
Darby had gasped at the speed with which I left him sprawled and unprotected on the bed. He writhed and bucked his hips, moaning and instinctively reaching for me. Not only that, but it was clear he was still in a hyper-emotional, potentially bad place by the way he started to cry and thrash his head.
“Please,” he begged. “I need you, I need it.”
I arched one eyebrow. Needing me and needing “it” were two entirely different things. My alpha pride wanted him to need me only.
“I know what you need,” I said, going full-in menacing. “But what I need is the only thing that matters.”
I shuffled off the bed, then grabbed Darby’s ankle as he tried to right himself and yanked him toward me. The suddenness of the movement surprised him, and whether by instinct or because he was back in the fantasy and playing his part, he attempted to scramble away from me.
I definitely wasn’t having that. I pulled him around, and when he tried to kick to free his ankle from my grasp, I let go and grabbed him around the waist. Darby cried out and gripped the bedcovers in vain as I pulled him to the edge of the bed.
