The Doctor's Command Page 7

  “We’re going to head out the back, using the tent as cover,” he said. “They’re coming from the ridge, so if we keep the tent between us and them, they won’t see us. We can move below the next ridge and travel into the bushland following up stream. That will give us water and cover.” He pushed her pack to her. “Put this on. Now.”

  She’d thought he’d had authority before. Now he had some kind of super authority. It felt as though disobeying him were unthinkable, much less an option. Chloe hunched over and followed after him as he made his way out of the tent and started running through the tundra at a relatively slow lope, which allowed her to keep up with him.

  After a few hundred yards, he stopped and crouched behind a tall rock. She followed his lead, hiding behind him—though she couldn’t see what she was hiding from. He pulled out some binoculars and fixed them on the distant ridge where the soldiers had last been seen.

  “They’re making good time,” he grunted.

  “What happens if they catch us?”

  “If they catch us, we start this process all over again,” he said. “With fewer supplies and in rougher terrain. If we fail, we’ll fail hard. There’s no out. No surrender. There’s no good meal and warm bed until either these two weeks are over or we reach the final checkpoint.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “About a hundred miles that way,” he said, pointing in a direction that told Chloe very little.

  Her heart was racing with adrenaline. She knew it wasn’t really real. She knew that they were really only an hour or so drive from a populated center. She knew that she was safe and this was only a simulated exercise. She knew all those things, but in that moment, it felt as real as anything else she’d experienced in her life.

  They left the cover of the rock, still crouched low, scuttling like bugs and moving at a brisk run. Chloe wished Paul hadn’t tired her out before the exercise started. And she really wished he’d told her she needed to eat. On reflection, he had suggested it, she realized, but she hadn’t really realized what he was trying to tell her. Now it was far too late. Her stomach was empty, her legs were already tired, and she had to keep pace with a military machine of a man who was already extending far too big of a lead.

  “Keep up, brat,” he called in a low voice, slowing a little. “We’ve got a couple of minutes to make that bush over there before they see us.”

  The last few hundred yards to the bush seemed like the longest and hardest run Chloe had ever undertaken. She could almost feel the eyes of dozens of distant soldiers boring into her, perhaps through scopes and sights.

  They made it to the bush line without too much trouble, but by the time they arrived Chloe was soaked with sweat, both from adrenaline and the heat of the day. The sun was still high and hot and she was utterly done with everything by the time the bush enclosed them.

  “The stream flows not far from here,” Paul said. “We need to reach it, then travel up it.”

  “Why can’t we rest? I’m tired.”

  “Because they’ll find our trail sooner or later, and when they do they’ll follow us into the bush and have an even easier time following it,” he said, giving her a look of censure as she brushed into a bush, breaking several twigs. “They have men who can find a footprint on a football field. If we go into the river, they’ll lose the trail and we’ll gain a bit of distance.”

  So she followed after him again, the light pack on her back feeling heavier with every step. She was relieved when they reached the stream he’d mentioned, and at first entering the cool waters with her feet was sort of refreshing. As time went on, the novelty wore off. Her feet squelched and squidged with every step and though the view of Paul’s ass framed in combat pants was nice, it wasn’t nice enough to make up for how hungry and tired and generally grumpy she was starting to feel.

  This was the point where real soldiers would have sucked it up and pushed through. But Chloe was not a real soldier. She was an actress and she was about done with this act.

  “I don’t want to do this movie anymore,” she said, stopping dead in the babbling stream, her boots soaked through. “I’m just going to sell everything and move to a ranch in Montana.”

  Paul stopped ahead of her and looked back with a crooked smile. “Is that right,” he said. “Giving up after less than an hour?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “What are you going to do about it?”

  It was a rhetorical question. She didn’t really expect an answer, but she got one anyway.

  “I’m going to cut a switch from one of these trees and whip your butt,” Paul said without missing a beat. “You don’t have a choice, Chloe,” he explained. “The last choice you made was the choice to come here and put yourself in my hands. Do you understand?”

  Chloe scowled at him. She did not at all appreciate the tone that seemed to imply she was either simple or silly or both.

  “I can always change my mind,” she said. “I’ll just go to those men. They’ll take me back home. They’ll have no choice.”

  “Those men will put you in a cell until they find me. Didn’t you read the terms of your contract, Chloe? I wasn’t playing when I said you’re mine for the next two weeks. There’s no way out of this.”

  Of course she hadn’t read the contract. She never read the contract. That was Chase’s job.

  “That can’t be legally binding.”

  “Yes and no. You quit on this and they’ll bring in another actress. You’ll go back to your spoiled, shallow life; the life you were so desperate to get out of, you threw your career under the bus.”

  He wasn’t being very nice, and he also wasn’t playing. She didn’t know how he was so perceptive, but then again, he wasn’t really saying anything hundreds of people weren’t saying on the internet. The comments on articles about her revealed a widespread bent of the psychoanalytic kind. Chloe had read about how she was a narcissist, a borderline, a bitch, and everything in between. Those comments didn’t hurt as much as Paul saying she’d had a spoiled, shallow life.

  “Why don’t you fuck off and judge someone else,” she scowled. “You’ve got no right to talk to me like that. This was a stupid idea. And you can’t make me do a damn thing I don’t want to do.”

  Click!

  There was a smooth sound as a knife was flicked from its case. Chloe stood on the bank of the river and watched as Paul made good on his threat and cut a long, whippy branch from one of the nearby trees.

  “You’re not going to use that on me,” she told him defiantly. “No way am I going to let you…” Her voice trailed off as she headed back into the water with Paul following after her, stripping the smaller twigs from the main branch.

  His legs were so much longer than hers, and the slippery, watery rocks made a getaway pretty difficult. Paul caught up to her before she reached the other side of the river, his strong hand gripping her wrist and hauling her out the other side.

  “Paul!”

  Her shriek made him clamp his hand over her mouth and pull her hard against his body.

  “Be quiet,” he growled in her ear. “We don’t have good enough of a lead for you to go screaming around the hills.”

  “Then let me go,” she said in a muffled voice.

  “The only place you’re going is over my knee,” he said, moving them both toward a large flat rock at the riverside. He sat upon it and managed to manhandle her over one thigh, her head just inches from the ground, her hands supporting her against the mossy rocks.

  Paul wasted no time pulling her leggings and thong down in one easy motion. His arm was wrapped around her waist in a tight locking embrace that made it impossible to get free. This time wasn’t anything like the first time he’d spanked her. There was no tender patting, no gentle introduction. There was just the quick swishing sound of the switch and then a sudden burst of sting in a thin line across her backside.

  Her resulting squeal earned her another stroke of the lash and a stern censure from Paul. “Quiet,” he said. “They’ll
hear you.”

  It was so, so deeply unfair. To be lashed with a piece of tree and to be expected to remain stoically quiet and accepting of the punishment! The switch landed again, this time it somehow landed across the first two strokes, creating two burning nodes of heat and pain where all three intersected.

  “Eeeep!”

  “Cute, but keep it down,” Paul reminded her. “Cover your mouth if you have to.”

  “I hate you,” she informed him with a snarling voice. Her backside was aflame, she was perched precariously over his thigh, she was embarrassed, she was sore, her pride was in tatters, and he expected her to make his life easier. “Let me up,” she said, “or I’ll scream and we’ll both get caught.”

  The threat did not go down well. The lash landed six times in quick, hard succession. She opened her mouth to scream, but he reached down with the arm that had kept her locked over his thighs and covered her mouth instead as she bucked and flailed, somehow keeping her bare bottom in perfect position for yet more ruthless cuts of the switch.

  Intense, concentrated sting broke her resolve to disobey. As the lash landed for what felt like the dozenth time, she began to whimper and plead in much softer tones.

  “Please… Paul… I’ll be good…”

  She didn’t know quite what words he wanted to hear, but those were the first ones that came to mind.

  “Being good means not complaining, means following my orders, means not being a spoiled little brat,” he lectured harshly.

  She had never seen this side of Paul before. He was a demanding disciplinarian. All the niceness of their initial meetings had faded into a hard, demanding presence that didn’t allow for any kind of misbehavior.

  By the time he righted her and allowed her to pull her leggings up over her sore bottom, she was flushed from top to toe. It was more confusing than it had been painful. From the beginning, she’d found it difficult to get a read on Paul, and now there was even more to try to understand. Her heart was pounding, perhaps from the struggle of being spanked that way, but more so from a rushing of emotions that were too powerful and swift to name.

  “We have to get moving,” he said, his eyes running over her in an appraising fashion. “Ready?”

  She nodded, wiping her nose on the back of her hand. It was running for some reason, as were her eyes. Some people might have said she was crying, but Chloe refused to cry in that moment. She wanted to, but her acting training was good for one thing—hiding one emotion behind another. Maybe she wasn’t strong. Maybe she wasn’t ready. But she could pretend to be.

  “Let’s go,” he said, waving her on. “There’s a spot with some shelter about half an hour from here. We’ll make camp for the night.”

  It wasn’t even close to nightfall, but the prospect of making camp cheered Chloe up. It shouldn’t have. An hour of tramping with a sore butt was not fun. She didn’t dare complain again in case he decided to whip her ass.

  She wanted to feel bitter and angry toward him, but weirdly that wasn’t actually how she felt. She felt sort of safe, and surprised. Nobody else on earth would dare to do what he’d done to her, she was pretty sure of that. Most guys treated her like a goddess. Paul treated her like she was very much earthbound, just a girl like any other. He’d spanked her because that was the way he dealt with bratty women under his command. It had been so long since she was treated ‘normally’ that being normal was almost more disconcerting than being punished.

  Chloe followed in his footsteps, putting one foot in front of the other until finally he called a halt. They had not spoken since the thrashing he’d handed out to her, and Chloe wasn’t sure she wanted to talk to him anyway. By the time he stopped, her mood had deteriorated into a deep and profound sulk. She would do as he said, but she didn’t have to like it—and she definitely didn’t have to be nice to him.

  The sheltered spot turned out to be a thicket surrounded by thorny bushes, and a couple of tall trees overhead. It was cooler, thanks to the shade of the trees, which did provide some kind of relief. Paul put his pack down and began setting up a small tent. Chloe dumped hers down on the ground and followed after it, sitting cross-legged in the dirt. It wasn’t totally comfortable, thanks to the stripes on her bottom, but she didn’t want to make any sound of discomfort that would let him know she was feeling it.

  “How long were you planning on sulking for?” The question came out of the silence.

  Chloe didn’t dignify the question with a response.

  Paul went back to work, doing whatever it was. She ignored him pointedly as the sun slowly sank ever closer to the horizon.

  “Hungry?”

  She was starving. But answering him would mean talking to him, and she definitely wasn’t talking to him. He’d just have to get used to the fact he couldn’t control absolutely everything. If she didn’t want to talk to him, she didn’t…

  “Hey!”

  Chloe let out a yelp as she was picked up more or less by the scruff of her neck. He sat down on a fallen log against which he’d pitched the tent and held her in his lap. Damn, he was strong. He didn’t have the steroid physique some actors had, but she was willing to bet he was stronger than any action hero. In one casual movement, he’d proved that he could handle her as easily as he could a kitten.

  That didn’t stop Chloe from struggling against her surprise capture. Not that it did her any good. His arms wrapped around her waist as she wriggled, making muted sounds of protest.

  “Let me go!”

  “No,” he said firmly. “I’m not going to have you sulk your way through this. A bad attitude can be dangerous. It means you’re distracted by your own negative thoughts. That could get you killed in a war zone.”

  “This isn’t a war zone. It’s a park.”

  She looked at him with ferocious rebellion and saw nothing but firm determination in his gaze. They locked eyes in a silent battle of wills, conversation taking place on a deeper, biological level.

  The light exertion hadn’t taken any real toll on Paul, but she could smell his scent. His sweat. It should have grossed her out, but somehow he smelled good. Masculine. Attractive. She felt that traitorous little trickle of arousal starting up again between her thighs and willed it to stop. It ignored her.

  “What am I going to have to do to you to improve this mood of yours, hmm?”

  The question, drawled close to her ear, sent little tremors through her flesh. What he would have to do, he would never do. He’d already turned her down. He was too professional. Too strict. Too by the book. His hands were on her hips now, holding her locked in place, stopping her from squirming. She hadn’t even noticed how much she was wriggling around until moving was no longer an option.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing, huh?” His hand shifted a little and his long fingers were angled down toward her crotch. There was nothing untoward about it, but the feeling of his hand so close to her sensitive regions after all he’d already done made her clit throb.

  It wasn’t fair how much he turned her on, or how easily he did it.

  “Stop teasing me.”

  “Who says I’m teasing you?”

  She shifted on his lap and felt a hard ridge pressing against the soft round of her cheek. His hardness. He was erect. Chloe looked at him in surprise and found his eyes focused on her, his pupils dilated with desire as he gazed at her.

  He was a military doctor. She was a famous starlet. But those were just labels that distracted from what they really were. A man and a woman, alone in the wild with nothing between them but a few fragile scraps of cloth.

  Instinct had more sway out here with nothing but rocks and trees and flowing water to witness them. Their mouths drew closer and before Chloe knew what had happened, his lips were on hers, firm and warm. He was kissing her, and she was kissing him back. Her lips parted to allow him entrance to her mouth even as her thighs spread and his hand slid down to cup her mound. She felt his powerful fingers press hard against the sensitive lips, holding her ti
ght and secure as his kiss became deeper and more possessive, his tongue lashing hers into submission on and on until her head began to swim and her breath grew short.

  Paul broke the kiss, but kept hold of her between her legs.

  “You look happier already,” he noted with a rakish smile. “I think I should fuck you.”

  The rough, almost brutish words startled her a little.

  “W-what?”

  His hand squeezed her mound, then patted it lightly. “I think I should fuck this naughty pussy. What do you think?”

  She’d never been asked the question so bluntly before. Chloe could barely believe what she was hearing.

  “Uh…”

  He began massaging her between her thighs with little circles of his hand that left her in no doubt as to his intent. He’d already made her come with her panties though, so maybe this was just another tease, another distraction. That didn’t stop it from feeling good. And it didn’t stop him from pausing for a moment, putting his hands to the waistband of her leggings and thong and pulling them down over her bottom, shimmying them down her thighs and leaving them around her knees. She was hobbled by her own clothing as he slid his hand back between her legs and found the wet, willing center of her body.

  She let out a little moan as he began to kiss her again, his seduction devastatingly effective and swift in equal measure. There was the sound of the fly of his pants sliding down, and then she felt his cock pressing against her bare butt cheek. She was sitting across his lap and the position didn’t allow him to push it inside her, but it did allow him to sink two fingers into the hot welling tightness of her pussy and begin thrusting in and out with a slow, pumping motion that left her moaning into his mouth.

  Paul knew precisely how she was constructed. He knew that her pussy needed to be filled, he knew that the tight little bud of her clit wanted to rub against the heel of his hand. His mouth left hers and he placed a swift love bite on the back of her neck as she writhed against his hand, feeling his fingers going as deep as they could go… but not deep enough.