“Pound me hard, daddy,” I moan into the bedclothes. “Punish me more.”
The Black Fox takes a vicious hold my hair and rams his cock into me, over and over, a brutal rhythm that has me flying high. He growls in my ear and then sinks his teeth into my shoulder as he comes.
For a moment he stays where he is, his weight on his arms and his cock lodged deep inside me. Then he slowly withdraws.
“If I untie your arms, do you promise not to take the blindfold off?”
I don’t know why it matters. But then I realize—he’s removed his mask. I long to see what he looks like, and whether he’s as handsome as I know he must be, but I nod. “I promise.”
The first thing I do when my hands are released is reach up and touch his face. I’m right, he’s not wearing the mask. He tenses beneath my fingers as if he’s afraid of something. As if I might discover some fatal flaw. I explore him carefully and his skin is smooth and warm. His short beard rasps against my fingers. I smile, reveling in the sensation of touching my lover. His brow is stern and his nose is long and straight. When my fingers touch his lips, he kisses them.
“What made you change your mind?” I whisper. I thought once he charged out of my room he’d never come back.
He nips at my fingers with his teeth. “My much worse half kept hearing you begging me to punish you, and I had to make mi niñita happy.”
His much worse half. Just because he likes to strap me with his belt and fuck me hard doesn’t make him a bad man. I love that he can work so hard to protect Spain, and be so sweetly cruel to me as well.
I reach up and lock my arms around his neck. “Please let’s run away together. I hate it here.”
He takes a deep breath and I know before he speaks that he’s going to say no. I cover his mouth with my hand. “Don’t tell me no. We can leave here together. Now, tonight. I’ll live a life as a runaway. I can be a vigilante, too.”
He draws my hand away from his mouth. “You want to live with me, wherever that might be?”
“Of course.”
He chuckles softly, and I frown behind my blindfold. “Is that funny?”
“No, mi niñita. It’s not funny. Only a little ironic that you’re asking me this now. There’s nothing I want more than to live freely with you, out in the open, but it’s too dangerous.”
“You’ll overcome your enemies.”
“Too dangerous for you.”
I sit in darkness, not understanding. I reach up to tear the blindfold off, but his hands catch mine.
“Niñita, you promised.”
“But why would it be dangerous for me?”
He sighs regretfully and pulls me into his arms, cuddling me on his lap as he sits on the edge of the bed. The warm night air caresses our naked bodies. “Because I’m cursed.”
I stare at the place I think his eyes must be. “What curse? Don’t be ridiculous! There’s no such thing as curses.”
“I used to think the same thing, but I know it to be true now. Ever since I…laid eyes on something precious. The most precious thing in the world to me.”
He sounds so sad. So bleak. “Black Fox, I don’t understand.”
He strokes my hair back from my face, and I know he’s gazing down at me. “When I was a very young man, a fortune teller called out to me in the street saying that I must hear what she had to tell me. My friends thought it was funny, and made me sit down while she gazed into her crystal ball. If I hoped to hear that my future would be filled with riches and happiness, I was sorely disappointed. She told me that I’m cursed, and that if I ever fell in love, I would die for love.”
I listen carefully to his voice, because it’s all I have to gauge his emotions. He speaks with utmost gravity. “And you believed her?”
“I think I must have. I became the Black Fox, and left everyone behind. I never felt one stirring of love, and I was glad. Until now.”
I bite my lip, wondering if he means that he’s felt the stirrings of love at last. “But, Black Fox. There’s no such thing as—”
He kisses me softly, halting my protests. For a moment I become lost in his kiss and the feel of his arms around me. My heart beats hard despite his strange words. Is this his way of telling me he’s falling in love with me, despite everything that divides us? He lives in the night, in the shadows, and I live in the day, in this cruel, unfeeling castillo.
“I want what is good and right, Black Fox,” I whisper, when my lips break from his. “I want you.”