Picture Perfect Cowboy: An Original Sinners Novel Read online

  Jason took a deep breath. “Easier said than done.”

  They left Rusty content in his stall and walked down the length of the barn. Jason brought her to a large sink and together they rolled up their sleeves and washed the horse hair off their hands.

  “You’re not going to answer my question?” she asked. “None of that worked for you?”

  “Some of it, I guess, maybe,” he said. He handed her a towel and she dried off.

  “Which ones?”

  “Let’s go in the house. The horses don’t need to hear this.”

  It was a good thing Jason was handsome. Made up a little for how frustrating he was being. A very little.

  Simone hoped the walk to the house would get him talking, but he didn’t say a single word all the way from the barn, up the path, and to the back door. They went inside and she found herself in his kitchen. It was old-fashioned and charming—white tile, porcelain sink, yellow paint, white curtains, a red rooster cookie jar.

  “Cute,” she said.

  “My sister Aimee came down for a couple of weeks after I moved in,” he said. “She stole my credit card and put the whole place together in ten days. Woman’s a miracle worker. I’d still be eating off a card table if she hadn’t put everything to rights.”

  Simone sensed he’d mentioned his sister for a reason. “You two close?”

  He nodded. “She’s my best friend. We’re only a year apart. And we have a lot in common. She’s a world-champion barrel racer herself. Or used to be before she quit to give me two nieces.” He pointed at his refrigerator and a picture of twin girls with brown hair in pigtails.

  “What are their names?” Simone asked.

  “Dani and Cassie,” he said. “That one’s Dani.” He pointed at the twin with red ribbons in her hair. “That one’s Cassie.”

  “They’re adorable,” Simone said with a grin. “Your parents must be proud of you and your sister.”

  “They are.”

  “You close to them?” she asked.

  “I love them. Mom would do anything for us kids, and Dad’s always been a good provider.”

  “That’s not an answer to my question.” Simone noticed he was very good at answering questions without answering them.

  Jason pointed to the kitchen table, a small round table with yellow legs and matching pale yellow chairs. She sat down and he sat across from her.

  “Dad’s strict,” Jason said. “Old-fashioned. No sparing the rod with him.”

  “Was he hard on you and your sister?”

  Jason sort of frowned and shook his head.

  “Just me,” he said. “Aimee’s the princess, not that she wanted that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I remember…Aimee was eleven and I was ten. She and I got into it over something, and she just jumped on my last nerve. I screamed at her. We were upstairs. Dad heard us.”

  “You screamed at your sister? Shocking. You know that’s kind of normal, right?”

  “Not in my family it isn’t. Men do not raise their voices to women in my family. It is not done at all. My first word wasn’t ‘mom.’ It was ‘ma’am.’”

  “You were only ten. You weren’t a man. You were a little kid.”

  “Didn’t matter. Dad jerked me out of the house by the arm. Thought he was going to yank it out of the socket. I was behind that woodshed with him for about an hour. Could barely sit for a week. But I think Aimee was more upset about it than I was.”

  Except it was Jason telling the story with the ghost of a terrified little boy in his eyes. He could pretend that hadn’t hurt him, but Simone could see it left scars.

  “Your father beat you for raising your voice to your sister? When you were ten? My sister and I had knock-down-drag-out fights. Doesn’t every kid do that?”

  “Men do not do that in my family,” Jason said again. “I only had to look crossways at my sister or mother and it would mean another trip back to the woodshed. And to even think of hitting a woman? If Dad ever thought I’d laid a finger on a girl I wouldn’t be allowed under the roof again for the rest of my natural life.”

  “Is that it? Is that what you fantasize about?” she asked. “Hitting women?” Simone kept her voice low and gentle. She thought they were getting somewhere—finally. “It’s okay if you do,” she said. “I like being spanked. Lots of women do.”

  She was trying to tease him into answering, but from the look of anguish on his face, she realized this wasn’t a confession she could tease out of him. Jason rubbed his forehead with his right hand, his elbow polishing the table top. He dug his hand into his hair and Simone saw his eyes were rimmed in red.

  “Jason?” Simone said. “You can tell me. Do you fantasize about hitting women?”

  Slowly, very slowly, he nodded.

  She stood up and patted the air to tell him to stay seated. She stood in front of his kitchen chair and took his face in her hands.

  “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” she asked.

  “I can’t believe I told you that.”

  “I’m glad you told me. You ever tell anyone else?”

  He shook his head.

  “Does anyone know?” she asked.

  Jason didn’t answer at first so Simone knew someone must know. Without asking for permission—easier to ask forgiveness, anyway—she sat on Jason’s lap and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. He didn’t complain or ask what she was doing. He simply put his arms around her waist to keep her from falling off his lap.

  She tapped her chest twice, over her heart and Jason rested his forehead there against her skin.

  “It’s easier to talk like this sometimes,” she said. “Close contact but no eye contact.”

  “Aimee,” he said.

  “Your sister knows?”

  “She borrowed my laptop without asking me first.”

  “She saw something?”

  Jason nodded.

  “Kinky stuff?” she asked.

  “Porn,” he said. “A girl tied up and getting hit with some kind of whip. It freaked her out.”

  Simone winced. She’d seen some porn online that had even freaked her out. “Was this before or after you moved here?”

  “Before. Right before.”

  “Was she mad at you?” Simone asked.

  “She said I ought to get some help.”

  “Good advice. Now you’re getting help. From me.”

  “Not sure that was what she meant.”

  “Doesn’t matter. If she’s not kinky she doesn’t know what kind of help you need. I do.”

  “You do?”

  “I absolutely do,” Simone said. “But you’re going to have to tell me a little more so I know what we’re working with here. There’s a big difference between wanting to spank a woman with her permission and wanting to punch a woman in the face without it. Can you tell me which of those is more your style?”

  “I’d never hit a woman,” Jason said. “I mean, not…like that. I don’t even know if I’d like doing it. I just, it’s what works for me up here.” He tapped his forehead.

  “You have kinky fantasies when you masturbate?”

  He groaned softly.

  “Jason, everybody does it. I do. I did this morning, in fact,” she said with pride. “Big hotel bed. Plenty of room to wiggle around.”

  “Nice thought,” he said, smiling.

  “I like the image of you stroking yourself off, too,” she said. “It’s very sexy.”

  “It is?”

  “You could tie me down and come on me,” she said. “That would be fun.”

  He groaned again. It was a much nicer groan that time.

  “Thought you said you didn’t do that with your clients,” he said.

  “I don’t want you to be a client,” she said. “Too many walls and rules. I’d rather we just keep getting to know each other, and then we’ll see what happens.”

  Simone knew she was taking a risk here, but she liked Jason so much already. She sensed he needed more h
elp than a pro could give him. What he needed was a friend he could really confide in and trust. He needed her.

  “I’ve known you all of two hours,” he said. “I can’t believe I’m telling you this stuff about me.”

  “Easier to tell a stranger,” she said. “It’s why people go to priests for confession. And you can confess to me. Anything. Anything at all. Trust me, I’ve either heard it before or heard worse.”

  “I hear it in my head,” he said, “and it sounds so awful to me. Too awful to say out loud. Especially to a girl.”

  “Jason, I had a client once who tied me to a chair and spent the next hour describing in gruesome detail how much it would turn him on to kill me, cut me into little pieces, cook me, and eat me. Literally eat me. Not the sexy way of eating girls. He wanted me on a plate. I was a vegetarian for two weeks after that. Is what you want going to be more awful than that?”

  She felt Jason’s shoulders moving under her hands.

  “Are you puking or laughing?” she asked. “I can’t tell.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Both?”

  “At least that guy tipped well. He invited me to dinner after the session. I took the money. I declined the dinner invite.”

  “Smart girl.”

  Simone took a long breath. She wondered how her friend Mistress Nora did this all the time with her clients—got them to trust her, talk to her, confide in her. If Nora were here she’d know what to do or say to Jason to make him open up.

  “I knew some submissive men who really struggled with their kinks,” she said. “Never known a dominant man to have this much trouble talking about it.”

  “I don’t feel all that dominant.”

  “Do you want to feel dominant?” she asked. “Is that it?”

  “I want to,” he said. “In my head I am. In my head it’s easy. Now that you’re here and you’re willing, I hope—”

  “Very, very willing.”

  “I just can’t…I can’t talk about it.”

  “Is it that bad?” she asked. “Do you have, I don’t know, rape fantasies? It’s okay if you do. My boss and his lady did rape-play. I’ve never done it, but I’m trained for it.”

  “It’s like that. Worse maybe.”

  “Is it something you think is kind of gross? Like scat play?”

  “God, no.”

  “Whew.” Simone laughed and waited for Jason to laugh with her. He didn’t. “Can you tell me why you’re having so much trouble with this?”

  Jason slowly lifted his head and met her eyes.

  “I need to believe I’m a good man,” he said. “I don’t know if I can be that or do that and also be a good man.”

  Simone held out her arm to display her tattoo of the cross.

  “He’s a good man,” she said, pointing to the cross tattoo. “And he’s a sadist. A real one. The kind who can only get turned on when he’s inflicting pain. He was good, though, because he never inflicted pain on women who didn’t want that pain. It was mutual. It was fun. He would take my face in his hands before we played, look deep in my eyes, and tell me how much he appreciated my service to him. Then he’d flog me and cane me and whip me into another dimension of reality. Afterwards, he’d do this with me—sit me on his lap and just hold me while I came back down to earth. And then he’d tell me how much better he felt, all thanks to me. He meant it, too. It always made me feel so special. He never even kissed me, except on the forehead. But I felt closer to him than people I’d slept with.”

  “Service,” Jason said. “I like that word.”

  “Is that what you’re into? You want a woman to serve you?”

  “In my mind…”

  “In your sexual fantasies, you mean?”

  Jason nodded. “In there, it’s more than that.”

  “Like…what? Sexual slavery?” Simone asked.

  “Kind of. Maybe. That’s bad, right?”

  Simone’s heart danced in her chest. She knew they were getting closer to a breakthrough.

  “Real slavery is bad, obviously,” she said. “But we’re not talking about the real deal. I mean, out there, outside your door, in the real world, slavery is pure evil. But in here, where it’s just you and me, it’s not the real world. It’s our world. And it doesn’t have to be bad if we don’t want it to be bad. It could be our own private fun thing.”

  “Fun? If I made you my slave, you would find that fun?” Jason sounded skeptical.

  “With you, I think it could be,” she said.

  “You wouldn’t be scared to do something like that?”

  “Not as long as you promise to honor my safe word.”

  “What is it?”

  “Jellybean.”

  He raised his head, eyebrow cocked high. “Jellybean? Seriously?”

  “My hair used to be rainbow-striped. A friend said it looked like jellybean colors so he called me Jellybean as a joke.”

  “Cute. I like the pink, though.”

  “Thank you,” she said, grinning with pleasure. Not every day a sexy cowboy told her he liked her pink hair. “I know you know how safe words work. As long as you don’t hear me saying ‘jellybean’ you know I’m into what we’re doing. So you can keep doing it. And doing it. And doing it…”

  “There’s so much I’d like to do to you, with you.”

  “Tell me, Jason. Please?”

  “I’d give you orders, make you serve me.”

  “What kind of orders? Make the bed? Sweep the floors? Change light bulbs naked?”

  “Suck me,” he said. “On your knees. Let me fuck you whenever I wanted, however I wanted, whether you were in the mood or not. And if you didn’t do what I wanted you to do just the way I wanted you to do it…”

  “You’d punish me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “By spanking me or cropping me?”

  “Right.”

  Jason was breathless now, and so was she. She couldn’t imagine how difficult it was for Jason to admit all this to her. For a man—raised by a father who beat him just for raising his voice to his sister—to confess to having fantasies about keeping a woman as a slave…she didn’t know whether to pat him on the back or kiss him. She did neither. His eyes were technicolor blue, hooded and glassy, like he’d ingested some potent cocktail, and she could tell he was hard. She could feel it through her jeans. And he’d pulled her closer to him. Not close enough. Until he was all the way inside her, it wouldn’t be close enough. The world had shrunk down to the size of Jason’s kitchen. There was no one on the planet but the two of them. She wouldn’t break the spell for all the money in the world.

  “Bad behavior should be punished,” she said. “I mean, otherwise how would I learn how to behave?”

  “No other way,” he said.

  “None I can think of,” she said. “And if a girl like me was owned by a man like you and I didn’t serve you the way you ought to be served, then I’d probably deserve to be punished.”

  Ah, she loved this game so much.

  “But not too rough,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to hurt you or break your spirit.” He ran his hand through her hair, spun one little curl around his finger. “Just teach you, train you.”

  “Train me to be your perfect slave?”

  “No such thing as perfect. Always room for improvement.”

  “I would love to learn how to serve you,” she said softly into his ear. “A man like you should have a girl of your own to use when you need her. When a man like you needs his cock sucked, he shouldn’t have to wait for it. If you had your own little slave, you wouldn’t have to wait.” She punctuated her little speech with a kiss on his ear. He shivered.

  “Nobody wants to wait for what they need,” he said. “Not that I’d be cruel to you. If I owned a girl like you, I’d take real good care of you.”

  “To be owned by a man like you would be an honor for a girl like me. Even if it was only for a night.”

  “You think we could try?” he asked, sounding equal parts scared and
hopeful.

  “I’d love to try it with you,” she said. “I’d love to serve you all night.”

  He smiled a little. “You’re only saying that because it’s your job.”

  “I’m not charging you a cent,” she said. “I want this.”

  “You mean it?”

  “I’m wet, Jason. That’s how you know I mean it.”

  “Are you?”

  “I swear,” she said. Simone touched his cheek and looked into his eyes. She’d never wanted to serve a man so much in her life, if only to show him how sexy, fun, and beautiful it could be. Someone needed to show him that. That someone needed to be her.

  “All right then,” Jason said. “Show me.”

  “Is that an order?” she asked.

  “It’s an order.”

  Five

  Jason put his hands around Simone’s waist and stood her in front of him. Some sort of trance had come over him. His hands weren’t even shaking as he unbuttoned Simone’s jeans and pushed them slowly down her legs.

  He wasn’t too surprised to find she wore pink lacy thong panties under her ripped and faded jeans. They were so frilly and feminine and looked so pretty on her full hips that he dipped his head and kissed the little bow at the center. She liked that. He could tell from the way she breathed in when his lips met her skin. If she were his all the time, day and night, he’d make sure she always wore little frilly things under her regular clothes, for his eyes only. He stayed close to her body as he slid her jeans all the way down her calves. He tapped her ankles to signal for her to step out of them. Her panties were so pretty he didn’t want to take them off of her yet. Instead he stood up and turned her toward the kitchen table.

  “Bend over,” he said. She did immediately, obeying the order like she’d been waiting for it.

  Jason knew he’d never seen anything in the world to rival the sight of a girl wearing his flannel shirt and pink thong panties bent over his kitchen table. Standing behind her, he put his hand flat on the nicest ass he’d seen in his twenty-nine years and pinched it. He didn’t pinch hard, not at first. He still couldn’t quite believe he was doing all this without her saying a word to stop him. He pinched her harder, hard enough to leave a red mark behind on her pale skin. She flinched but didn’t say a word.