Page 24 of H Is for Hardcore

Hot man, cold steel, hot blood trickling….

No, he couldn’t know. No way.

But what if he did?

I had to take the chance. It wasn’t as though knife fetishists lurked in every bush.

I took a deep, steadying breath, tried to imagine that Viking woman with her well-honed little blade. She’d say what she wanted, woman to man, unafraid and blunt.

“For cutting,” I said, then realized I was stating the obvious yet saying nothing. “Cutting flesh.”

“Cooking? Field-dressing game?” A little cock of his head suggested he knew I was prevaricating.

Another deep breath. “Living flesh. Human flesh.”

His expression darkened. Still his eyes were bright, but with his face so stern and serious, it was a dangerous light, perhaps sadistic, perhaps a little crazy.

Crazy in the same way I was?

“Are you a cutter? Suicidal?” He loomed over the counter at me and I realized how big he was. Not broad or bulky but tall and hard-bodied, someone who could be a dancer or a danger. Loki for sure. “Get out. Get help or get an ordinary knife, but don’t use my blades for your self-destruction.” He turned from me, started to walk away.

His backside in jeans was beautiful. His arms were beautiful. I could imagine him looming over me, holding me down as he cut me.

“Wait,” I said, caught him before he disappeared into the back. “It’s not like that. I…. Knives turn me on. And I want one special blade.” The words came out in a shaky rush.

He turned again, smiled at me this time. “For a special someone?” Something about the play of light and shadow there in the back corner made him both glorious and diabolical. Loki indeed, plotting some clever but potentially dreadful mischief.

I wasn’t sure where I found the words, let alone the nerve to speak. “For when I find that special someone. I like to be prepared.”

“Then you should try out a few, or have them tried out on you, if that’s your preference. And I think it is.”

Before I could answer, he swept past me—I swear he left wind in his wake—turned his sign from open to closed, pulled a curtain across the inside of the small, barred display window to mask the shop’s interior.

Two steps and he was pinioning me to his body, holding my arms at my sides. He smelled like steel—a sharp, cold smell—and leather and smoke and a workingman’s sweat, as if maybe he’d been bent over a forge earlier. He kissed like a wolf would, both rough and tender, devouring and devout, as if he wanted to gobble me up whole but wanted even more to make sure there was some of me left for later.

I should have been frightened: a complete stranger whose air of danger was very much part of his attraction, and a shop full of weapons, and things moving much too quickly in a direction that, no matter how much I craved it in my fantasies, yearned for it on the surface of my skin, was potentially deadly.

Instead, it acted like gasoline on the cold fire that steel always sets in me.

Maybe I was frightened, deep down where I wasn’t paying attention, but the roiling in my stomach, the shaking hands, the racing heart felt more like arousal than terror, and I leaned into him, opened my lips for him, went at him with tongue and teeth myself, a she-wolf who’d finally found her mate.

His hands were calloused and a little dirty—slurry from sharpening blades, perhaps—but when he caressed my face and down my throat, tracing the line of the jugular vein, I moaned deep in my throat, imagining the same delicate touch from a knife, just skimming my skin, hinting at a million possible deaths without doing any harm. I arched against him.

“Don’t move,” he said in that Nordic voice, and the hand that had touched my face withdrew. I closed my eyes, then opened them again. I wanted to see.

The knife he unsheathed from his belt was a simple one, utilitarian but elegant in its simplicity, with a dark wooden handle and a blade perhaps three inches long, which, at the moment, looked utterly huge.

I followed it with my eyes as he raised it to the hollow at the base of my throat, the point resting not so much on the surface of my skin as just above it. I could sense the steel radiating energy, but I couldn’t feel actual pressure.

I held my breath as he left the knife poised there. Kept holding it as he carefully raised it and with the same delicacy, traced down my cheek, applying no pressure at all, just a whisper of passage. Kept holding it as he moved down the side of my throat, applying just the faintest hint of metallic pressure in the spot where Dracula would like to bite.

I wanted to lean into the blade, but some vestige of common sense—or maybe it was the grip he had on me with his other hand—kept me still.

At least some of me was still. I didn’t move or even breathe, but my pussy was twitching and trembling and leaking hot juices that filled my underwear. Close to orgasm already. “Please,” I mouthed, afraid—and yet eager—to take the breath I’d need in order to make noise.

“Patience.” His eyes twinkled in that evil way, and instead of nicking the tender skin, he withdrew the blade, sheathed it. Then his grin broadened and he grabbed for my crotch, a bold move that I couldn’t protest. Not when I writhed against that firm hand like I did, wishing my jeans weren’t in the way.

He chuckled. “I can feel how wet you are, right through your jeans. I bet I could make you come right now, on my hand.”

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