BARE HANDS - A Bad Boy Romance Novel Read online

  She was right about one thing: I did enjoy playing the “bad guy”.

  I led her into the forest, in silence, and I felt like the big bad wolf again, luring little red riding hood to her certain death. The thing is, here’s how I’m not a bad guy: she wanted it. There’s no mistaking it, when a girl wants it. Her wanting it sits on her skin like a perfume. It’s on her lips. It lingers in the way she speaks her words. Sometimes, she hasn’t even admitted it to herself yet, but her body knows before she does, and it betrays her at every turn.

  And now this little thing, this little lamb called “Penelope” had landed in my life, a literal babe in the woods, if you like, and I can swear to any God that’s listening: she wanted it. That’s why she lingered a little with me instead of leaving with Mama Tembi, even though that would have been the natural thing to do. That’s why she giggled. And slapped my arm. And stared at me, eyes big as saucepans, just begging for me to tell her what to do next. And it’s also why she was obediently following me now, into the darker, rougher foliage that marked the end of the natural village, and the start of my own little domain.

  Living alone in the wild like this makes you sharp. Women, on the other hand, make you crazy.

  I could already feel her getting under my skin, could already feel my mind flit back to her again and again. I’d fuck her, of course. No question. But for my own sake, I was hoping it would be soon. Independent sort that I am, I couldn’t allow a woman, no matter how cute, to take up too much space in my mind. There were other important things going on in there. Dark things. It was no place for a woman. Or a girl, as it were.

  I turned back and saw her tapping away on her fucking cellphone. Christ.

  “The reception is actually really good here! How crazy is that?” she squealed from a few paces behind me. Her voice sounded out of place in the forest.

  “Yeah, crazy,” I mumbled. When I turned again she had a quivering little frown on her face, then shoved the phone back into her pocket.

  “Everything OK?”

  She flickered a big, fake smile at me.

  “Of course!”

  We walked on. Her shoes weren’t holding up. They never do. When we arrived, her face scrunched up so quickly I swear I could hear it. She walked cautiously round the cabin, confirming that it really was as small as it seemed, and popped round the other side, an ugly look of concern plastered all over her face. I was going to enjoy watching those judgmental little eyes roll back in her head when I finally screwed her.

  My eyes slipped over her form. She was hot, although didn’t know it. She carried herself like she was still 14, but her hips were surprisingly full, and her thighs looked stronger than I would have guessed. Turns out that she was only a waif from the waist up. Now that she was in a little skirt, and trainers, her body seemed a little more robust.

  As she poked around at the exterior of my humble abode, I waltzed over to the mango tree, unwound a thin strap of leather that was knotted there, and whirled it around my wrist.

  “Do you want to see my garden?” I asked. She nodded, and so I gestured for her to follow me a brief way off through a thicket and to my own growing project. My personal Eden, pristine, like it might have been before God created humans and messed everything up. I watched her pick through the plants and wind her way through the furrows. Her shoes were getting so dirty. For some reason, this made me smile.

  “Wait …is this…?” she had a large leaf in her tiny hands and was examining it closely.

  “Marijuana” I said.

  She immediately dropped it from her hands.

  “But …isn’t it illegal?” She looked over her shoulder. This, too, made me smile.

  “Well, just look at it. It’s a plant. Its roots are in the ground, and its leaves are up here, in the sun. It’s growing. Doesn’t seem like it cares whether someone thinks it’s illegal or not, does it?”

  She laughed.

  “But you’re the one growing it!” she said. Her thighs were so pale. So milky.

  “Nah, it’s growing by itself. I’m just here, helping it along.”

  “Well, I’m sure nobody could possibly object to that!” she said, and laughed sarcastically.

  She looked so pretty when she laughed.

  “Do you want a mango?” I said.

  “Sure, I didn’t think you could fit a fridge in that tiny hut of yours!”

  She spied the mango tree behind me and then blushed deeply.

  “Ohhhhh I’m such an idiot. You meant …ok, I get it. It’s just that we don’t have those at home. Mangos just growing in the wild like that, you know?” she smiled.

  I smiled in return. She was different, at least, in this way. To laugh at your mistakes? Let’s just say it’s not something I saw often.

  “What does your boyfriend think about you coming here, and for so long without him?”

  She stopped smiling.

  “He’s fine with it” she said, convincing nobody.

  “He’s fine with it?”

  “He understands I need to explore the world a little, on my own, before…”

  The giant saucepan eyes were on me again. When she wasn’t forcing herself to smile, she actually had a very curious kind of beauty to her. A brittle beauty.

  “Before what…?” I asked.

  “Before we get married, obviously.”

  “You can’t explore anything once you’re married?” I said.

  “No, obviously you can, it’s just that, once you’re a wife, your priorities change, you know?”

  “Well, what are your priorities now?”

  She caught me looking down at her bare, creamy thighs. The skin at the very top was nearing translucent, and she was close enough for me to make out a few faint blue thread veins there. Like she was made of porcelain. It was oddly beautiful. She exhaled loudly and then looked off to the distance.

  “I don’t know, to be honest. I want to be useful. That’s all. I want to find out what God’s plan is for me, and then to follow that, with all my heart. I want to reduce the suffering in the world, even if only a little…” she said and then looked at me with soft eyes, as though already apologizing for having said too much. It was a raw moment. One that I wasn’t quite prepared for.

  She smiled all at once and broke the tension.

  “What do I know? I’m just a dumb missionary girl, right? But it’s important, to just go along with God’s will, even if you don’t understand it…”

  “Wait, even if you don’t understand it?”

  “Of course. I’m trying to just open up, and to surrender, to his will for me.”

  “Surrender. That’s an interesting word choice” I said, hoping to make her blush. She didn’t.

  Without thinking, I leapt behind her and clasped at both her wrists, then in a few split seconds I had unwound the thin leather strip from my arm to hers, and whipped it round once, twice, then three times to bind her, pulling tight to capture both her hands behind her back. She pulled back a little but stared at me, speechless, her mouth hanging open.

  I yanked the tail of the leather strip down and forced her arms and shoulders back, and her pretty breasts up. She froze. Though she said nothing, I could feel her thinking. I had her firmly in my grasp: she was going nowhere.

  “Are …are you going to kill me?” she stammered at last, as I stood behind her, pinning her so hard that the strip cut into the skin on her wrists.

  I laughed.

  “You’ve been watching too many horror movies,” I said.

  She started to cry. Then all at once, her small body was twisting and squirming. She dug both her heels into the soft ground and tried to drop down, to wriggle me off. She was stronger than she looked – yanking hard on her restraints, she tried to fold up her hands and pull free. Her elbows thrust out as she tried to stab at me with them. I held her easily, though, wrapping my chest around her as she kicked and fought.

  “Why don’t you surrender?” I said smiling into her ear, once she had stopped for a m
oment to gain her footing and her breath.

  “What?”

  The breathiness in her voice was seriously turning me on.

  “I said, why not surrender? To the Lord’s will. Clearly, he wants you to die here, in this forest, with me.”

  “You’re crazy!” she spat and started kicking again, flinging her blonde hair from side to side. I held her with scarcely any effort. She was tired again in no time. Her entire body crumpled easily in my arms.

  “I’m not crazy. And you said yourself, you don’t have to understand it. Just comply. Just surrender…”

  “Untie me right now, you asshole…” she hissed, and I loved the extra kick of energy it seemed to give her to swear out loud.

  “Tell me, Penny, why don’t you just submit to God’s will?”

  “This isn’t God’s will, you idiot! This is just your will!”

  “Yes! Exactly! But how do you know the difference?”

  She stopped squirming. A tendril of her hair was snaking over my cheek. It smelt of powder and privilege and prettiness. Her chest rose and fell as she panted for breath. I liked her like this, with a little fight in her.

  “Are you seriously trying to make a point right now?” she asked. Her voice had lost its girlish politeness. I wondered whether she would scream.

  “Well, maybe it’s just not for you to question these things!” I said and laughed.

  Grabbing the makeshift knot on the leather strip, I found the tail and clasped it like a dog leash. When I pulled it, she staggered backwards. Like this I led her to the mango tree, then trussed her up on one of the lower branches; it was low enough that she had to bend slightly at the knee, but high enough that she couldn’t collapse entirely. She squeezed her knees together and glowered at me, and something in the gesture alone sent electricity through me. I could do whatever I wanted to her. Anything. It was just me, her, and my tanned thighs against hers.

  “You’re going to be in so much trouble because of this. I’m going to tell everyone” she said, through disheveled hair. It amazed me how even now, completely powerless and at my mercy, she was still biting her tongue, still unwilling to lose her cool too much. “Just because I surrender to God’s will, it doesn’t mean I don’t have my own will. Let me go.”

  “Nope.”

  “Oh for heaven’s sake. This is dumb. What are you trying to prove? This is totally stupid…”

  I said nothing.

  “So, what, you just tie me up here and now what? What happens now?”

  I picked up a crooked stick and scratched idly in the sand as she yelled at me. There was no doubt about it: righteous indignation was a good look on her. I crouched down on my haunches and played with some leaves with the tip of the stick.

  “And? Are you even listening to me? What are you going to do? I’ll scream, you know. What are you even thinking about?”

  I looked up at her. Her face was flushed and her chest thrust forward. She was still cowering a little at the knee, unable to sit, yet unable to stand.

  “Oh, I’m just thinking about what I’m going to do next” I said.

  “Well?!”

  I smiled.

  “I have a theory about girls like you,” I said. I scratched lazy circles into the sand.

  “Well, that’s interesting, I don’t want to hear it” she spat.

  I got up and sauntered over to her. Slowly. Taking my time, dragging the stick behind me like it was a weapon I just hadn’t figured out how to use yet.

  “What’s it like, being tied up there, completely unable to move?”

  “What do you mean, what’s it like? It’s awful, obviously. What a stupid question” she said.

  “Hm. You can’t go anywhere. You can’t do anything…”

  “Because you’ve tied me to this damn tree” she said, raising her voice and yanking at the leather strip one more time.

  I snaked a line in the sand and traced a wavy, swirly shape that landed at her shoe tip. I bounced the tip off the rubber of her sneaker and drew little loops around it, like her foot was the center of a strange, misshapen sunflower. She looked down at all this with fire in her eyes. Then I brought the lines up and over her shoe, then traced them further so the tip of the stick scratched a little at her sock, then at the bare skin just above it.

  “Please just let me go. I’m so scared. Oh God,” she said, fresh panic in her voice, her eyes going wet again.

  “I won’t hurt you.”

  “Then what? Why are you doing this?”

  I traced the stick higher up still, over her bare shins and up to her knees. The stick left thin white welts on her already pale skin, which rose up in goosebumps, even in the midday heat. I swear I could almost hear her heart beating, wild and fluttery. Like a rabbit’s.

  “Don’t you want to hear my theory?” I asked.

  She scowled at me. But she couldn’t look away. In one lingering, juicy moment, she let me stay there, in her eyes, looking straight at her. Straight through her.

  “Well, my theory is that you like being told what to do. That it’s not hard for you to surrender to God’s will at all. In fact…” I dragged the stick tip up a little higher, over the mound of her knee. She made no effort to squirm away. “In fact, I think that you really like surrendering to other people’s will. God’s or otherwise.”

  Her face was stony. But I had her attention. At that moment, she was focused on nothing in the world except me. And that crooked stick. And the naked flesh on her thighs.

  “Am I right?”

  Her eyes looked as though they could burn a hole through my head.

  The stick reached the hem of her little skirt and lingered there. We both stared back down at it.

  “I bet you’re wet right now” I said, quietly. The tip of the stick caught on the edge of her skirt. I lifted it. Just an inch.

  The forest whispered and rustled all around us. For a moment, I almost felt sorry for her. I smiled and flung the stick aside, shrugging.

  “Come on, I’m just messing with you!” I said, laughing.

  Her eyes followed the stick as it skidded across the ground. Her mouth twisted.

  I sidled up to her again, close. Real close.

  “Unless I was right?” I whispered, my cheek nearly touching hers.

  “They warned me. They told me to stay away from you. They said you were involved with bad things. Oh God I wish I had listened to them. You’re crazy. I just want to go home. I hate it here, I hate you and I hate this place…”

  Instantly she was sobbing, but before I thought about what I was doing, I leaned in and pressed my lips to hers, all soft and wet with tears, and to my surprise, she kissed me, enthusiastically, straining at her wrists to kiss back at me. She had squeezed her eyes shut, sending tears rolling down each cheek, and she went desperately after my tongue, a little hungry baby bird, strung up and still flushed in the cheeks from telling me what an asshole I was.

  I trailed a hand down and found the hem of her skirt again, lifted it, and slid my hands onto the soft cotton of her panties. My fingers didn’t even have to pull aside the slip of fabric to know that she was soaking wet underneath. I dipped the ends of two careful fingers into the sweetness and smeared them out against the gloriously smooth skin of her inner thigh. Her flesh there was the softest thing I had felt in months – maybe years. Supernaturally soft. The kind of softness you wanted to protect …and then defile.

  I pulled back, my fingers leaving a trail of slickness down her legs. I peered down at her, all five feet nothing of her, looking back up at me, lips wet and eyes big and hopeless.

  “See? Just as I thought. I was right after all!”

  I reached behind her and began to work out the knot at her wrists.

  “What are you doing?” she said, panicked.

  “I’m untying you.”

  I could tell she had to stop herself from saying, “why?”

  I flung the thin leather strip off to the side and it went curling into the dust. For the first time, she
looked genuinely unhappy.

  “I …I don’t understand” she said at last, rubbing the raw skin at her wrists, searching my face. I started back towards the cabin.

  “Well, I tied you up, but now you’re free to go. Didn’t you say you wanted to go home, and that you hated me and hated this place? I suspect you’ll want to call your boyfriend as soon as possible and let him know.”

  “Fiancé” she whispered.

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  “He’s not my boyfriend, he’s my fiancé” she said again.

  “Ok, cool. Whatever. Have a safe flight home.”

  “You …you’re just going to leave me now?” she squeaked. And holy hell if it wasn’t the most adorable fucking thing I’ve ever heard. I could have done it there and then. I could have swooped her up, kissed the tears off her cheek and made sweet love to her, and then not-so-sweet love, and she would have cried and kissed me and thanked me all the while.

  But that would have been too easy. Besides, I wanted her even hungrier still. She wanted me, but it wasn’t enough yet. I needed her to come crawling. I needed her to lose her pretty little mind and beg me to fuck her. And she would. If I played this right.

  “Yeah. Unless there was something else you needed me to help you with…?”

  She looked like she didn’t know what to do with herself.

  “I don’t know how to get back to the village” she whimpered.

  “Oh, if God wills it, you’ll figure it out…”

  Her lower lip quivered.

  “You’re a monster.”

  “And you’re free to leave.”

  “I’m going to tell everyone what you did to me today” she hissed, trying a different tack.

  My hand was on the door to the cabin. I turned to look at her dead on.

  “Sure, but if you tell anyone …then this never happens again” I said. Something strange flickered over her expression. I went inside and closed the door behind me. Once my eyes adjusted to the light in the cabin, I could make out the slender, naked form of the rabbit, hanging to cure on the far wall, where I had left it a few days ago. It was a full minute before I heard her footsteps crunch on the stones outside and she left.

  She was back within a week.