Hold Me Harder
by Renee Dominick
Copyright © 2017 by Renee Dominick. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.
Chapter One
The chain of emails stacked up on Natalie’s phone. As fast as her finger flicked across the screen, she couldn’t out-scroll the incoming shit hitting the proverbial fan. It was not a good day to be out of the office, but her little sister, Chloe, had insisted on this wedding-party bonding weekend, as if they could all just drop their jobs and their lives and come to middle-of-effing-nowhere Idaho for three days. Worse, the best man—Natalie’s ex, Ryan—had managed to squeeze into her limo at the last moment. She caught him watching her more than once, his vivid blue gaze palpable and almost unbearably heavy. It had been weeks since she’d kicked him out of the condo they’d been sharing and she hadn’t spoken more than a few words to him since.
When the limo’s tires changed from humming across asphalt to crunching over gravel, Natalie muttered a profanity-enhanced sigh of relief.
Her twin brother leaned across her to gawk out the window as they passed the ranch’s largest corrals. When their family had vacationed here eight years ago, Rob, the one horse-mad family member, had missed it because of his job.
“Told you,” Natalie said, without looking outside. Having been here scores of times, she knew exactly how impressive it all was.
“There’s telling me, and then there’s seeing for myself.” Rob sat back after they passed the barn. “I’d rather have spent the summer here than tutoring athletes in a classroom that smelled like week-old gym socks.”
Natalie gave him a sidelong glance. “You say that, but you haven’t met Javier,” she muttered.
“I’m sure he’s no worse than any other horse wrangler,” he replied.
“Right.” The limo stopped and she looked out the window. The first sight of Javier’s lodge never failed to wow her. Gigantic timbers, round and raw, framed a two-story entrance over a sprawling log building. Along the front, a wide, inviting porch extended its full length. Natalie had always thought of it as a Wild West castle made of lodgepole pine. Smaller cabins nestled on the forested hillside behind the main lodge, although the word “cabin” was inadequate. Each was a luxurious little nest.
Here was the scene of her sexual awakening, and Javier, the man responsible, was out there somewhere among the horses. Her eyes darted between the corrals where the Paints and Appaloosas lazed in the afternoon heat, then to the largest of the stables. Odds were, that’s where he’d be. Inside, with his sleek Andalusians. She hoped she’d have time to settle in and get over her jitters before she had to face him again after more than a year apart.
Natalie blew out a long breath. A weekend in the presence of two ex-lovers. No wonder she was as nervous as a cat.
The others in her car spilled out like puppies, joining the crowd from the first limo. Most of the bridesmaids had coordinated their attire like the recent sorority refugees they were, dressing in western-style shirts tied at the waist, cowboy boots, tight jeans, and straw cowgirl hats. Natalie, on the other hand, had spent her morning at work. She arrived in a gray pin-striped skirt, silk shirt, and high-heeled pumps just barely on the businesslike end of the scale.
The third limo pulled up just as Natalie was stepping out, and the other girls raised a cloud of dust as they danced over to welcome the bride and groom to be.
“Yee-HAW!” Chloe shouted, waving her hat overhead as she emerged from her limo, with Dave, her impending husband, right behind. He grabbed her hips and they gyrated together, a grinding Texas two-step.
Natalie rolled her eyes and leaned against the side of the limo while the driver unloaded the suitcases, her finger scrolling the message queue, the phone vibrating nonstop in her hand. Her boss thrived on getting the masses riled, and not one of her idiot coworkers could resist the reply all button. She had the sudden urge to shove the phone into her panties and let it do some actual good. The idea brought a smile to her lips. Sorry, boss, I couldn’t respond. The phone was otherwise engaged.
“What’s so funny?”
Ryan stood too close for comfort. She frowned at him. “Nothing.”
He tugged on her tote bag. “Lime green? Taking a walk on the wild side, Nat?” He tilted his head at an oblique angle, his crooked, disarming smile inviting her to smile back. Before, she would have. Not today.
“Yes, that’s what me carrying a lime green bag means,” she said, dropping her phone inside it.
His smile faded and he shook his head. “C’mon, Nat. We’re going to be in each other’s company a lot this weekend. Can’t we—?”
“Not if I can help it,” she said, cutting him off and pretending to look for something else in her bag.
“It’s been a month.” He pushed back an errant lock of hair that had fallen across his face, his long, elegant fingers forking through the sable strands. “Don’t you think we should eventually talk?”
Natalie pressed her lips together. She didn’t want him trying to penetrate her thoughts, probing for weak spots. There’d been nothing actually wrong between them when she’d run; in fact, their relationship had been adventurous and full of laughs until his taste for sexual adventure trod too close to the lifestyle she’d lived with Javier, the one she’d left here at the ranch. He’d crossed a line she hadn’t told him existed, and she’d panicked.
The limo driver dropped her overstuffed Louis Vuitton suitcase on the ground, and Ryan reached for its handle at the same time she did, his fingers brushing hers. “Let me help you.”
“I got it,” she said, her molars clenched. She didn’t want to walk beside him, didn’t want him to push her to talk, didn’t want him to make her regret. The phone buzzed inside her bag. She grabbed the handle of her suitcase and jerked it away. “I have to go deal with the office.”
She turned away from the disappointment in Ryan’s gaze, and cursed her heart for breaking just a little more.
The suitcase weighed a ridiculous amount for a weekend getaway, and its inadequate wheels threatened to fly off as she bumped and jostled it over the uneven ground. Between it and her need to tiptoe across the gravel path in stiletto heels, Natalie made slow progress. She was grateful when several of the ranch’s young, cowboy-attired employees burst through the front doors of the lodge and fanned out among the arriving guests, greeting them and helping with the luggage. A calloused thumb brushed across the underside of her wrist as someone reached for her bag.
“Natalie,” Javier said, his quiet greeting catching her off guard. “I’ve missed you, amorcita.”
Damn. His heavy Andalusian accent, warm as the land from which he hailed, twined with the lingering brush of his thumb, and together they welcomed her back. Javier didn’t smile when she looked up at him—he’d always been circumspect in the presence of her family—but affection was there in his eyes. He’d changed little since she’d last seen him. His hair remained defiantly dark, as if not even one strand of silver dared appear, his olive-colored eyes, framed by curling black lashes and severe brows, still pierced, and his skin would forever be burnished bronze by hours outdoors.
“I would have said you’d be the next to last person I’d see here again,” he teased.
“Yes, well, my mother wasn’t invited this weekend.” It was an old joke between them. A dude ranch—even a luxury one—had not been her mother’s idea of a real vacation. She’d hated it. Vocally.
It hadn’t really been Natalie’s ideal trip, either, but she had distracted herself by flitting between the young cowhands, until Javier—ten years older than her and miles further on in worldliness—had ejected her from his barns for the duration of their stay. Outside in the corrals, he’d looked down his crooked patrician nose and waved her off with undisguised superiority…and drew her to him like a bee to lavender. She’d fallen at his feet, and he’d introduced her to the world of sensual dominance.
“Obviously, I didn’t expect to be back, but I wasn’t about to disappoint Chloe,” Natalie said, her smile barely a twitch.
“And this has you distressed.”
Her gaze slid away from his all-too-observant one. “It’s a bad day to be out of the office.” Natalie shrugged to mask her unease. “And it’s not easy for me to be here. You know that.”
Javier scanned the bridal party, nineteen of them stretched out along the path from the front steps of the lodge to the limousines. His gaze sharpened when his survey swept past her shoulder. “Ah, so this is your Ryan,” he said. “You’re right. You chose the corporate version of me.”
Though Natalie had been determined to stay away from Javier once she turned her back on life as a submissive, their long history made a clean break all but impossible. They kept in touch via the occasional email or phone call.
“He’s nothing like you.” Notwithstanding the dark hair, broad shoulders, and self-assured manner. Other than that, they weren’t alike at all.
Javier clicked his tongue, but the tilt of his brows gave away his amusement. “You’re being very hard on him. Are we to inflict some payback this weekend?”
“It wasn’t my intention, no,” Natalie said, though in the end her intentions wouldn’t matter. Javier knew she had run from Ryan and why. Her first distressed phone call had been to him. If he wanted to inflict payback, he would. Still, she said, “I’ve been successfully ignoring him.”
“He’s not going to allow it. You know this, right?”
“Allow what, being ignored? He doesn’t have a say in it.”
Javier gave her an exasperated look, then collapsed the handle of her suitcase and hoisted it onto his shoulder in one smooth movement. “We shall see.” He took off at a sedate walk, as if hauling forty bulky pounds on his shoulder was nothing. Which, she supposed, it wasn’t, when he could carry a newborn foal or a recalcitrant calf with the same casual ease.
Natalie watched him stride away, as affected by him as she’d been from day one. His backside, encased in jeans so well-worn they molded his shape like a second skin, made her fingers itch to caress the familiar curve of it. She ran her gaze up to his shoulders and over his taut forearms, on full display below the rolled-up cuffs of his shirt. He’d never lacked for physical beauty, but it was his quiet, steady dominance that had attracted her from the start.
As if he felt her looking, he turned back, a shallow cleft between his brows. “Are you coming?”
She hoisted her tote bag onto her shoulder, and the weight of it dragged her blouse askew, exposing the curve of her breast.
Javier’s gaze dipped and then rose back to her face, his eyelids lowering as a flash of disappointment crossed his features. Anyone bothering to look would see nothing, but she knew better. He had always insisted she dress with decorum, disapproved of revealing attire—except, of course, when he had decreed it, and it was usually for his eyes only.
Natalie flushed, and her fingers tingled with the sudden influx of blood. She raised a shaky hand and drew the silk back into place. She wasn’t his anymore, but his expression implied repercussions nonetheless.
He nodded his approval and turned to make his way to the lodge.
The breath she released was as unsteady as her hand had been. She had left Javier when she could no longer reconcile the two sides of herself: the alpha professional, to whom others looked for guidance and leadership, and the sexual submissive, to whom it sometimes felt that this man had become more necessary than air. Now, two minutes in his presence and it was as if she’d made no choice at all. This had been her fear in coming back, this feeling of being exactly where she belonged.
Ryan drew abreast of her, his speculative gaze moving between her and her retreating suitcase. “So, this is the cowboy.”
Natalie scowled at him. Ryan knew she’d had a prior relationship with a rancher, but she wasn’t about to confirm his guess.
“Intense guy.” He jerked his head toward the lodge. “So, Natalie? Are you coming?” The astute look he gave her spelled trouble. He didn’t wait for her answer, just strolled toward the front door, one hand in his pocket, the other towing his black leather carry-on bag behind him.
She tiptoed the final few yards to the front steps of the lodge on unsteady legs. In the lobby, neither her suitcase nor Javier was in sight.
Natalie had chosen to stay in the main lodge rather than share one of the cabins with her sister’s friends. When she gave her name at the front desk, the cheery young receptionist handed her a card key and informed her that her bag had already been delivered to her room.
The warm smell of sage welcomed her into the luxury suite, its king-size bed lush with bolsters, pillows, and a down comforter encased in crisp white linens. A brown velveteen chaise sat at an angle next to a picture window, full-length to take advantage of the view of the barns and corrals, and beyond that, the scrubby, pine-covered hills cradling Lake Pend Oreille. Next to the chaise, on a small, round table, sat an enormous bouquet of peonies so deep red they were almost black, sprigs of hibiscus, and stems of fragrant rosemary. Dark and sensual, just like the man who’d gifted them.
She wanted more than anything to sprawl onto the chaise and relax in the sumptuous room. Instead, she set up her laptop and plugged in her overburdened phone to charge. When she found herself staring outside again, she yanked the sheer inner-curtains closed, to at least obscure her view. No time for daydreaming. If she didn’t make an appearance on the email chain soon, her boss would pop an artery. Based on her phone-scrolling, this marketing miscue wasn’t great, but it wasn’t earthshaking—or time-critical—either. It was three a.m. in Shanghai. Since she’d become the company’s unofficial crisis manager, she’d had to learn to separate incidents into DEFCON categories, and this one was a low-two, max.
While the computer booted up, she went to her suitcase, kicked off her shoes, and tossed the contents of the bag, looking for more comfortable clothes. Three quiet beeps from the card key mechanism caught her ear. Only one other person would access her room. She turned her head as the door handle lowered.
“Dios mio,” Javier said, striding inside, the door closing behind him with a solid click. He took hold of her hips from behind and pulled her against him, his lips and teeth sweeping down her neck, marking her, claiming her as he’d always done. He wrapped her in familiar scents: ponderosa pine and horse and the tang of the tobacco sticks he chewed while he rode, at once piquant and musky. “I wondered if I would ever get to lay my hands on you again.”
She relaxed against him and reached back to slip her hands into his rear pockets.
“How easily she settles back into her native state,” he murmured, his lips against her temple.
“Old habits,” Natalie said with a quiet laugh.
“It feels good to have you here, cariño.” His palms drew over the contours of her breasts, down her belly, and out to the sides of her hips.
Even through layers of clothing, her body came alive, her nerves crackling and desperate for a more intimate touch. Skin to skin. The hundreds of days since they’d last been together trailed away like so much dandelion fluff.
“Now tell me the truth,” he said, propping his chin on her shoulder. “How have you been?”
She turned in his arms. “I’m fine,” she said, touching her finger to one of the grooves bracketing his mouth and tracing it down to his beard. “You look like an austere Spanish gentleman again.” The last time she had come to the ranch, he had just returned from a month-long cattle drive with his whiskers a brillo of unruly tufts that reached for his cheekbones. Now it was trimmed close, its outline sharp.
He brought her fingers to his mouth and bit down on the tips. “He isn’t done with you, your Ryan.”
Natalie didn’t want to discuss Ryan, but she knew Javier wouldn’t drop it unless he was satisfied with her answers. She kissed his chin. “He had his chance.”
“That isn’t what I mean, cariño. He wants you. Like this.” Javier ran his hands over her bottom. “To be his pequeña. His little one.”
Natalie shook her head. “He’s not—”
Javier put his thumb across her lips. “He is, and he knows what you are. Inside. What you could be with him. Why do you think he brought a submissive to you, if not to invite you to explore?”
She stilled and looked up. “What do you know of him, Javier?”
“What I see with my own eyes, cariño.”
She stared past his arm. “It doesn’t matter. I’m not going back to this life. Not with him.” She tried to step out of Javier’s arms.
“Stop, pequeña,” he ordered. His fingers bit into her flesh as he tightened his grip on her bottom. In their everyday conversation, she was cariño, sweetheart, but in dominant mode, Javier called her pequeña, his little one, the name that demanded her submission.
He ran a finger over her brow and held her wary gaze with his serious one. “I failed you, Natalie. I never taught you to recognize the signs of someone looking for a submissive partner, how to know whether he is the right man for you.” Javier reached behind her head and removed the two wooden picks from her hair, letting it cascade across her shoulders. “I never thought you wouldn’t be mine.”
Indeed, Javier had molded her from the beginning. Submission had been contrary to everything she thought she valued, and yet, when she gave her cares—and her care—to Javier, her world had changed. She wanted to please him, ached for his guidance, his rewards, and even his punishments. Until the incongruity of her life had begun to prey on her.
“I don’t need to recognize signs, mi sol. I’m not looking.”
He clicked his tongue, a sharp sound so full of disappointment it gave her a frisson of unease. “When did you become silly, Natalie?”
“I’m not silly,” she said, bruised by his words. “I wanted to find my own way. And I have.”
“Have you? I see your computer and your phone and your corporate clothes.” He gestured around the room. “You’re the jefe there, but what of your other side? You are only half a person right now.”
That he so blithely identified her unease made her breath hitch. “More than half,” she argued, but she experienced a flutter of anticipation as he moved to sit on the end of the bed.
“Come here, pequeña.” He waved her over. “Take off my shirt.”
Natalie wavered, ready to bolt. Forward or back, she couldn’t say, until she took the first step toward him and everything inside her relaxed like a bird settling to roost.
“You knew you couldn’t come here and have it any other way between us, right, cariño?” he said with a wistful smile.
“I should have.” She thought she’d prepared for this trip, mentally. It was disappointing to see how badly she’d fooled herself. She had lived with Javier’s control for too long not to fall right back under his influence, especially since she now understood how much she had missed this blanket of tranquility, of not having to choose, of having no choices to make at all.
Her fingers trembled as she fought with the buttons on his shirt, but she finally managed them and pushed the edges aside. As ever, she was undone by the sight of his body, muscled and scarred, marked by a lifetime of working with horses. The bulges of his shoulders and the lines and undulating strata of his chest and abdomen drew her fingertips like a magnet. She reacquainted herself with his body, flicked her nails across his drawn nipples, small but positive proof of how she affected him. Her eyes followed the line of dark hair leading down his abdomen and rested on the ridge evident inside his jeans.
Natalie licked her lips.
He threaded his fingers in her hair and tipped her head back. “I should make you,” he said, “but it would be selfish of me.” He cupped her breast, drew his thumb back and forth across her nipple, raising it to take between his teeth through her blouse. His hands skimmed down her back, around her hips, and lower, to catch the hem of her skirt on the webs of his thumbs. Dragging upward, he exposed the length of her thighs, her satin and lace underwear, the pale skin of her belly. She stood motionless before him as he slid his thumb up and down the silky front of her panties, the rough edges of a callous snagging the weave.
He pressed his lips to her belly button, coiled his tongue in languid turns from the rim into its basin before moving outward to press kisses around the small bulge of her tummy. Down and down he moved, one kiss at a time, while his fingers smoothed over her bottom and inched under the high arc of lace. His palms settled over her bottom, his fingertips curving into the crack. “You can breathe if you want, cariño,” he said quietly.
She really couldn’t. Breathe. She swayed forward and reached for his shoulder when he drew the front of her underwear aside and touched his tongue to her, following the seam upward, coiling again, this time around the sensitive bud concealed near its apex. She drew in a stuttering breath then, and heard his hum of satisfaction.
He kissed deep in the join of her thigh, nipping the tendon, drawing his tongue through the soft depression inside of her hip bone, and all the while his hands worked on her blouse, unbuttoning it more deftly than she had managed with his shirt. He pushed the silk over her shoulders and drew the backs of his fingers over the flimsy netting of her bra, soothed and pulled at her nipples beneath before leaving her breasts to run a deliciously coarse finger through her folds. He found her wet and wanting. “Come here, pequeña,” he said, and turned her to sit between his legs, her back to his chest.
When she had settled, he drew a bandana from his pocket and used her thigh like a table to fold it into a neat band. The simple, methodical act delivered a keen ache, no less than any explicit touch he could have teased her with.
With slow, deliberate movements, he smoothed back her hair and covered her eyes with the cloth. Then he sat, still and silent, as he waited for her other senses to engage. This aspect of his dominance had been a surprise to her from the beginning, the rising desperation for his touch she found almost more painful than any physical punishment he might employ as he drew the moment beyond its breaking point.
Finally, Natalie remembered to find the warmth of his hands hovering over her legs, her breasts, to listen to the rhythm of his quieter, calmer breathing. Only then did she relax. And only then did he ease her thighs apart and slip his fingers through flesh ready and waiting, curling and uncurling his fingers over her damp softness. Spirals of sensation unwound within her, careened up her spine and down her legs.
Natalie’s head dropped back onto his shoulder and a moan, part agony, part joy, struggled up her throat.
“How I’ve missed that sound,” Javier said, his thumb circling, his fingers pressing, pulling a soft gasp from her.
He overwhelmed her with sensations inside and out until she was reaching, her fingers digging into his thighs, desperate for release. But, by his rule, she was unable to beg. He would break her in his own time, or not at all.
She had forgotten what it was like to be driven to the edge by his softly spoken erotic praise. To be kept balanced at the tipping point for so long, the pain of it, and the pulses of heat scorching her. The mindfuck of it all. Her breathing was shallow when she breathed at all, for the sound of his voice paralyzed her with hope.
He took her earlobe between his teeth and said, “Look, mi pequeña.” He drew off the bandana. “Do you think he’s enjoying it?”
Natalie blinked to clear her vision and inhaled a sharp exclamation at what she saw through the filmy curtains. Ryan’s familiar outline, standing on the porch outside her room, still as a cardboard silhouette. Lust, hot and demanding, swamped her, made her pulse inside.
“It pleases you,” Javier said, his unfaltering fingers winding her to the limit of what she could withstand. She couldn’t hold back her mewl of need as she strained between his thighs, her hips tilted into his hand.
“Come for us, then, pequeña. Now.” His demand, his thumb on her clitoris, his fingers deep inside her, Ryan’s presence…all of it sent her soaring, keening into the exquisite darkness.
He held her steady and quiet after, until her mind cleared and her limbs came to solidity again. “How long has he been there?” she groaned.
“Long enough.”
Natalie turned her head at an acute angle to glare at him. “Why would you do that?”
He chuckled, a low rumble against her back. “I only invited him to relax on the chairs out front, to enjoy the vista of the lake and the horses. I doubt he can see inside, cariño. His view in is worse than ours out. He’s probably trying to figure out if there is a raccoon giving birth under the porch.”
She thumped her shoulder blades against his chest. “Beast.”
He laughed louder this time, deep and rich and exceedingly rare. The sound made a different sort of warmth blossom through her. Affection, mixed uncomfortably with second thoughts about having tossed this all away.
God, she was pathetic. So easy, so malleable. Twenty minutes and a primal orgasm and she was his again. Her gaze traveled back to the window. She was something much, much darker, too. The voyeuristic thrill of seeing Ryan there, of providing a show, had electrified her.
“He could be your protector, cariño. If it can’t be me,” Javier said, as if he had sensed her thoughts. “And if you wish it.”
Natalie looked back at him again, finding his gaze gentle as he stroked the length of her hair. “I don’t.”
“He can’t keep his eyes off you, and with so many miles between us, I can’t keep mine on you. He took a misstep, but I would mentor him, if you want. Teach him, so that you could have this again.”
“I…” She shook her head. “I don’t want it again.”
His expression turned grim. “I think you do. Only I think you’re too stubborn to admit you have been living a lie.” Javier eased her to her feet and stood to twitch the heavy velveteen curtains over the sheers. He unbuckled his belt as he stalked back toward the bed. “Give me your hands, mi pequeña,” he said, the leather snapping through his belt loops. “We’re not done here, yet.”
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