Page 63 of Jax (The Kansas City Reapers #3)

I swore under my breath, not from shame, but release. A crack split down the middle of every wall I’d gripped tight. “You say shit like that and I forget how to breathe.”

“You’re not here to breathe,” he said, voice closing around me like a fist. “You’re here to feel. To become.”

I nodded, pulse quickening.

He reached for the rope, threading the first coil through his hands with practiced ease, like he was drawing meaning from fiber.

His fingers moved without effort, focused and reverent.

I knew those hands. I’d felt them at my ribs, my hips, my throat.

But this wasn’t the slow burn of foreplay. This was a ceremony.

He looked at me again, voice low and unwavering. “Last chance.”

I didn’t flinch. “Don’t stop.”

The first rope grazed my skin, and I forgot how to swallow. It didn’t matter that we’d done this before, that he knew every slope and plane of my body. Tonight held weight. Intention. His grip on the jute was decisive, his presence different, quieter, heavier, more rooted in purpose than pleasure.

He began at my chest, wrapping high across my collarbones while I stood still, arms bent behind me, offering myself, not out of fear but hunger.

The rope rasped over bare skin, each pull sending sparks up my spine.

His tension wasn’t cruel. It was precise.

Tightened with care. Another line wrapped just beneath my breasts, framing them until every breath pushed harder against the fibers.

My nipples peaked from the heat of exposure. From the thrill of being claimed.

My chest rose. The rope held. It didn’t yield. It redefined.

He stepped behind me without a word, his breath brushing the back of my neck, his body close enough to blur every thought.

He attached a rope to the center of the harness, between my shoulder blades, and then ran it up and through one of the carabiners in the middle of the rig.

He pulled it just taut enough that I felt it, but not so much that it lifted me.

Then he slid an arm around me from behind, following the line of rope across my ribcage.

“This knot here…” His voice slid against my ear like smoke. His fingers pressed just over my sternum, touching the cross-point of tension and control. “This is where I’ll pull when I want your breath to catch.”

My eyes fluttered closed. Pressure already coiled across my ribs, tight and thrumming, and the way he said it, like he wasn’t asking, just delivering a promise, made something sharp and molten bloom low in my belly.

This wasn’t just arousal. It was reverence.

He didn’t touch like he wanted to own me.

He touched like he already knew how I’d fall apart, and how to hold the shape of what remained.

His hand drifted lower, tracing the harness where it wrapped beneath my breasts. He wasn’t groping. He was sculpting, and every knot was a declaration. Every pull, an unspoken command.

“And this cross-point,” he murmured, fingertips grazing just under my breast, over the place where breath and heartbeat collided, “when your pulse races, it’ll throb like an alarm. A signal. A reminder that you’re mine.”

My throat closed around the weight of his words.

My hips surged forward before I could stop them, chasing heat, chasing friction, chasing him.

I wanted pressure. I wanted his hands everywhere.

I wanted to be taken apart piece by piece, tongue-tied with jute, voice caught in the rope’s hold. But he didn’t move.

He let me tremble against the bindings, body straining for more, and gave me nothing.

It was maddening. It was perfect.

My head dropped back, mouth open, a soft sound catching on my lips. “Fuck…”

Still, he didn’t rush. Just circled me, slow, measured, studying his own work like I wasn’t even human anymore. Like I’d become material. Breath and bone and tension. A canvas.

“You’re beautiful,” he said, and it wasn’t praise. It was the truth.

His fingers adjusted the bottom edge of the harness, compressing tighter. Not painful, just enough to remind me of what I’d chosen to carry.

“You’re beautiful because of how much you’re about to hold.”

Something opened inside me. The ache to be remade into something solid, tension and curve bound into meaning. I wanted to hold meaning in my bruised skin and call it art. My voice broke before I could stop it. “Say it again.”

He stepped in close, one hand steadying my jaw. “Say what?” he asked.

“Say I’m beautiful.”

He didn’t blink. “You are. In this. In the hold. In the way you don’t flinch.”

My knees buckled under the weight of it.

“Say what you need,” he murmured, voice like molten steel. “Say what’s real.”

“I want to feel everything,” I whispered. “I want to disappear inside it. Be gone. And seen.”

His jaw flexed. “You will.”

He dropped to his knees in front of me, and my heart surged into my throat. His hands cupped my thigh, lifting it slowly, folding it until my knee pressed to my chest. I gasped. His palm was warm, and his grip was unyielding. He held me like something he could break. And I wanted him to.

The rope came next, tight bands spiraling from thigh to calf, coiling like a serpent up my skin. Each loop carved pressure into muscle and flesh, locking me into a new shape. I trembled, but I didn’t ask him to stop. I couldn’t.

“You feel that line down the center?” His voice dropped, rough and steady.

I nodded.

“That’s not just for show. That’s part of the structure of this tie.” His fingers traced the rope’s path down my thigh. “That’s where your weight hangs. Where you’ll find your balance when I make you fly.”

I was already shaking.

He slid a hand beneath my ass to shift the knot, firm, unapologetic, just shy of obscene.

“Balance is the key,” he murmured. “Even in agony, we find balance.”

I had no words. My grounded leg felt abandoned, the rest of my body already lifting.

I ached for symmetry, for the next press of tension.

When he clipped the rig, the rope above creaked, slow and sure, and then I was rising, first the bound leg, then the harness pulled tight from my sternum, each inch stealing breath.

My spine arched. My toes left the floor.

Then there was nothing but air, and rope.

I hung suspended, tilted and trembling. One leg bent, the other stretched. Arms behind me. Chest exposed like an offering. My breath broke in ragged pulses, mouth open but empty. He wasn’t touching me, but I was still entirely his.

Jax stepped forward, slow and silent, until he stood before my shaking chest. I nearly sobbed.

“Gravity is cruel,” he said, dragging his knuckles between the ropes stretched across my ribs. “But I’m worse.”

I whimpered.

He cupped my jaw. “You good, wicked girl?”

“So fucking good,” I gasped, eyes stinging. “Please. Don’t stop.”

His thumb brushed my lower lip. “That is the one thing I will not do.” Then he moved to the rig, adjusted the suspension ring, and twisted me, hips one way, chest the other, until my whole body lit up in a scream of sensation.

My shoulders stretched taut, ribs compressed, thigh spasming under the strain.

Breath shattered. Heat bloomed like wildfire beneath my skin.

And he watched. Not idle. Not detached. Obsessed. His gaze burned over every inch of me, cataloging the rope, the tremble, the way my body clung to every cruel line of tension like it was holy.

Breathing turned vicious, every inhale a fight against the rope cinched around my chest, ribs, arms pinned, leg bound, body twisted midair like sculpture strung up in need.

Each exhale made my nipples throb, hips twitching, every brush of jute a cruel tease over skin stretched and aching.

I was soaked. Suspended. Starving. And he hadn’t even touched what throbbed hardest.

Jax circled slowly, not reverent, not kind, just deliberate denial wrapped in heat. He studied every twitch, traced every gasp, until I was no longer a woman, but a pure expression of rope-bound reaction and need. I was his. Nothing else.

When his hand finally dragged across my stomach, steady and slow, gliding from under my ribs to the waistband of my panties, it ignited every nerve like fire to fuse.

I gasped, thighs jerking, core clenching around nothing.

My hips chased the contact instinctively, but I couldn’t move. I was bound. Exposed. Already there.

And when he paused, just let his hand settle, heavy and certain, I nearly came from that alone.

“You’ve soaked through these,” he said, voice dark and calm and devastating. “Dripping like a good little rope slut who doesn’t even need her pussy touched to beg for it.”

My head fell back as a broken sound tore free, breathless and wrecked.

I couldn’t answer him. Words were gone, carved away by a need so sharp it tasted like metal.

He hadn’t even touched me properly, but slick already coated my thighs, every breath dragging heat across raw skin, every heartbeat tangling hunger and humiliation until I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.

He slid a finger beneath the waistband, eased the fabric aside with obscene care, and let cold air rush against soaked skin. I shivered, helpless.

“Goddamn,” he murmured, voice thick and reverent. “You’re fucking drenched.”

His fingers drifted over my folds, not inside, just a ghost of contact, enough to part me, enough to drag across every pulsing inch without pressure. Just a reminder of how bare I was. How little I had left to hide.

“You want it that bad, don’t you?” he asked, calm as sin, like he was offering coffee instead of the ruin I was begging for.

“Yes!” I gasped. “Fuck, yes. Please.”

He didn’t move. Just let his fingers hover at the edge of my slit, close enough to burn.

“You want my fingers in you?” His voice dropped, thick with cruelty. “Want me to fingerfuck you midair like the needy little cunt you are?”