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Sudden SurrenderElliot has spent years completely focused on his studies, giving up almost every chance at a social life in the process. Now, moving to a new university to study for a post-graduate degree has given him the perfect chance at a fresh start. He hasn’t quite worked up the courage to visit the leather club just off campus, but he’s determined not to be a complete hermit. An advert for a light-hearted outdoor event that promises the chance to meet other students seems like the perfect way to begin.
Parry has never had any patience with the stupid hazing nonsense that takes place with every fresh intake of students. He only ever signs up in order to keep an eye on things and make sure nothing gets out of hand. He has no intention of actually getting involved in silly student games—not until he spots Elliott being led, bound and helpless, through the forest. Please note: This is the second edition of this title. It was previously released under the title Elliot’s War and as part of the Gaymes Anthology. This edition has been re-edited and re-worked to form part of the How I Met My Master… Collection, but it has not been extended.
Facts and Figures:
Series: How I Met My Master... (Book 2) Length: Short Novella (22,000 words) Genre: Contemporary, BDSM, Erotic Romance Pairings: Male/Male Published: August 2018 |
Excerpt...
A light-hearted outdoor event designed to help you get to know your fellow students. Yeah, right.
Closing my eyes for a moment, I took a deep breath and tried not to panic. It wasn’t easy, especially when I was all too well aware of certain, very pertinent, facts. Facts like—we’d only travelled three hundred yards through the woodland behind the university, and I’d already found four separate tree roots to fall over. Like—the rope around my wrists was starting to chafe, my roman sandals were giving me blisters, oh, and my captors were haphazardly painted blue.
Being gagged, tied up, and led through the forest by a dozen men was bad enough, but the blue streaks and swirls that covered their skin were really starting to freak me out. And even the woad wasn’t the worst of it.
I was actually quite determined not to think about the most horrifying fact about my predicament. The ‘ignore it and it will go away’ theory hadn’t done me a damn bit of good so far that evening, but I hadn’t quite given up hope that, at any second, it still might yield fantastic results.
The guy holding the other end of the length of rope knotted around my wrists, tugged at it. I sped up and promptly stumbled over yet another bloody tree root. I was starting to think that none of the bloody things grew underground in that part of Wales.
One of the students playing the part of a rather inauthentic Celtic warrior, looked across at me and laughed.
Ha, bloody, ha ha! I was pretty sure that the guy with the screwed-up sense of humour was the same one who’d rugby-tackled me right into a muddy ditch. I was never going to get the stains out of my toga.
Suddenly, something caught my eye in the forest to my right. None of the pseudo-Celtic warriors around me seemed to have noticed anything out of place. I tried to be subtle as I stole another glance at the same patch of trees. Somebody had been standing there a moment before, I would have bet my life on it, but there was no sign of them now.
That was good, I decided. Whoever it was, they were being covert, and I was pretty sure that’s what people were supposed to do when they were rescuing prisoners from enemy soldiers. Someone was coming to save me and, please God, if they hurried up, they might actually have time to do that before everything got very, very complicated for me. There were some things I really wasn’t ready to explain to my captors.
Our group moved out from between the closely spaced trees and into a less crowded area of woodland. It seemed to be a clearing of some sort, where several different well-trodden paths merged together before splitting from each other once again.
A man stood in the middle of the cross-roads. He was wearing a pair of loose brown trousers and some sort of open shirt. Inside my head, I ran through every swear word I knew.
There was no doubt that the man was the same guy I’d seen tracking us through the trees. Unfortunately, both his face and those bits of his body that were visible past the open edges of his shirt were splattered with woad.
Another Celt. Fan-bloody-tastic. I was starting to think I was the only ‘invading’ student attending the damn university that year.
I wasn’t entirely sure if the toga I’d been given was meant to imply that I represented a Roman invader or if the costume woman had strange ideas about what Saxons wore, but I hadn’t seen anyone else running around in the forest wearing sandals, a cut-up white sheet, and bugger all else. As a solo suicidal fashion statement, it was really starting to get on my nerves.
“Parry! Well met friend.” My captor raised a hand in a cheerful, and rather drunken, welcome. The sudden jerk on my wrists pulled me forward. I only just managed to save myself from falling flat on my face.
And it was obviously well past the point when swear words should stay inside my head. The gag-muffled curse brought everyone’s attention toward me.
After a few chuckles at my expense, most of my captors looked away. The new guy, Parry, didn’t. I returned his inspection moment by moment. Tall, dark, and generally very nice to look at in spite of the blue paint. His arrival obviously wasn’t going to help me with my most significant problem of the evening.
Parry stepped towards me. The other students stepped back and let him through without a word. When he stopped in front of me, Parry tucked a knuckle under my chin. He made me look up and meet his eyes. Seconds ticked by with glacial speed and I felt myself blush under his inspection.
Don’t look down, Parry. I repeated those words over and over inside my head, wondering if there was a chance in hell that the universe would do as I commanded for once. Please, don’t look down.
Against everything my luck had taught me to expect from the world, Parry didn’t look down. He turned his attention to the men who made up the party of would-be Celtic warriors instead. “That’s enough, now,” he said. His voice was deep, his Welsh accent very pronounced. “Leave him be for a minute. Let him get his breath back.”
It wasn’t quite an order to untie me and let me go, but I was willing to believe that it wasn’t a bad start. It was possible that Parry would decide I’d breathe easier with my wrists free, right?
Parry turned back to me and caught my eye again.
“But—” someone piped up.
“But nothing. Go on, bugger off, the lot of you.” Parry never looked away from me as he said it.
“But—” the guy tried again.
“Someone’s tapped a barrel of ale by the campfire up there. If you leave now you can get drunk, but if you stand there arguing for much longer, you’ll be left with the dregs.”
“What about him?”
I recognised that voice—it was the guy holding the other end of my rope. I held my breath as I waited for Parry’s verdict.
“I’ll keep an eye on him,” Parry said.
Parry seemed a bit older than the other guys—probably a post-grad student, like me. Maybe that was why the other students did as he said. Maybe it was the lure of the ale. Or maybe it was Parry’s tone—which made it sound like he was making a statement about what would happen next rather than a suggestion. Whatever the reason, the other students didn’t argue further.
I watched them walk away. Through the trees, I could just make out the sight of a campfire in a clearing some way down the sloping side of the hill. The man who’d been holding my rope was the last to leave. He tossed his end of the tether to Parry on the way past and, as he disappeared along the same path the others had taken, I suddenly found myself alone with a new captor.
I looked up and met Parry’s gaze. He had bright blue eyes—the woad brought them out quite beautifully. Bad thought. I looked away before Parry could see anything in my expression that might betray me.
Without warning, Parry stepped forward. I automatically stumbled a step backwards. He took another pace closer to me, and I backed away again. One more move in the odd little dance and something touched my shoulder.
I jerked around. I’d retreated right into to an old gnarled tree trunk. Damn. By the time I looked back towards him, Parry had closed the gap between us even further.
I bit out another curse. My gag once more turned it to gibberish.
“Hush now, bach. I’m not going to hurt you.”
Robbed of my ability to provide a sarcastic response, I raised an eyebrow instead. If I understood the rules of the stupid little war game come university hazing thing properly, then being captured by the enemy meant I was going to have to spend the fortnight before classes started in earnest, doing whatever my captor wanted. So, I was pretty sure my pride was going to take a battering over the next fourteen days, if nothing else.
Parry smiled down at me as if he knew exactly what I was thinking. He was taller than I’d realised, now that he was up close. He was broader across the shoulders too.
“Now tell me,” Parry ordered, his voice dropping to a whisper. “What’s really scaring you. Is it the fact you’re tied up, or the possibility that someone might notice just how much you’re enjoying being tied up?”
Blistering heat rushed to my cheeks. Obviously, the folds of my toga weren’t hiding my hard-on half as well as I’d hoped they were. Awesome.
Parry reached out and tugged at my gag. The strip of fabric slipped from between my lips to hang around my neck.
I took a deep breath, but I didn’t even try to take advantage of the opportunity to speak. I just stared at the leaf-littered ground to Parry’s left and waited to find out what would happen next.
“Gay?” Parry asked.
He didn’t sound homophobic. That alone was a better result than I’d scraped up hope for. While I could, theoretically, think of worse fates than spending two weeks waiting hand and foot on a man who would love to make any gay man’s life a living hell—I couldn’t come up with that many fates which were that much worse.
I offered Parry a cautious nod.
Parry didn’t sneer. He didn’t even take a step back. He took half a step closer instead. “Single?”
Oh… I blinked up at him. Now, that did change things…
I offered Parry another silent nod.
Every time Parry had reduced the gap between us, he’d been looping the rope in his hands, keeping the section between us taut. He put even more tension on it as he took yet another half-step closer to me.
“Out?”
I nodded again. It was pretty much true—I was perfectly willing to be out if the man who had me tied up was gay. I held my breath as I waited for the next question.
“Submissive?”
I’m not sure what I’d expected Parry to ask me at that point, but that wasn’t it. I felt my blush deepen. I nodded again, just once—a movement so tiny I hoped I might be able to get away with denying its existence if I needed to.
A light-hearted outdoor event designed to help you get to know your fellow students. Yeah, right.
Closing my eyes for a moment, I took a deep breath and tried not to panic. It wasn’t easy, especially when I was all too well aware of certain, very pertinent, facts. Facts like—we’d only travelled three hundred yards through the woodland behind the university, and I’d already found four separate tree roots to fall over. Like—the rope around my wrists was starting to chafe, my roman sandals were giving me blisters, oh, and my captors were haphazardly painted blue.
Being gagged, tied up, and led through the forest by a dozen men was bad enough, but the blue streaks and swirls that covered their skin were really starting to freak me out. And even the woad wasn’t the worst of it.
I was actually quite determined not to think about the most horrifying fact about my predicament. The ‘ignore it and it will go away’ theory hadn’t done me a damn bit of good so far that evening, but I hadn’t quite given up hope that, at any second, it still might yield fantastic results.
The guy holding the other end of the length of rope knotted around my wrists, tugged at it. I sped up and promptly stumbled over yet another bloody tree root. I was starting to think that none of the bloody things grew underground in that part of Wales.
One of the students playing the part of a rather inauthentic Celtic warrior, looked across at me and laughed.
Ha, bloody, ha ha! I was pretty sure that the guy with the screwed-up sense of humour was the same one who’d rugby-tackled me right into a muddy ditch. I was never going to get the stains out of my toga.
Suddenly, something caught my eye in the forest to my right. None of the pseudo-Celtic warriors around me seemed to have noticed anything out of place. I tried to be subtle as I stole another glance at the same patch of trees. Somebody had been standing there a moment before, I would have bet my life on it, but there was no sign of them now.
That was good, I decided. Whoever it was, they were being covert, and I was pretty sure that’s what people were supposed to do when they were rescuing prisoners from enemy soldiers. Someone was coming to save me and, please God, if they hurried up, they might actually have time to do that before everything got very, very complicated for me. There were some things I really wasn’t ready to explain to my captors.
Our group moved out from between the closely spaced trees and into a less crowded area of woodland. It seemed to be a clearing of some sort, where several different well-trodden paths merged together before splitting from each other once again.
A man stood in the middle of the cross-roads. He was wearing a pair of loose brown trousers and some sort of open shirt. Inside my head, I ran through every swear word I knew.
There was no doubt that the man was the same guy I’d seen tracking us through the trees. Unfortunately, both his face and those bits of his body that were visible past the open edges of his shirt were splattered with woad.
Another Celt. Fan-bloody-tastic. I was starting to think I was the only ‘invading’ student attending the damn university that year.
I wasn’t entirely sure if the toga I’d been given was meant to imply that I represented a Roman invader or if the costume woman had strange ideas about what Saxons wore, but I hadn’t seen anyone else running around in the forest wearing sandals, a cut-up white sheet, and bugger all else. As a solo suicidal fashion statement, it was really starting to get on my nerves.
“Parry! Well met friend.” My captor raised a hand in a cheerful, and rather drunken, welcome. The sudden jerk on my wrists pulled me forward. I only just managed to save myself from falling flat on my face.
And it was obviously well past the point when swear words should stay inside my head. The gag-muffled curse brought everyone’s attention toward me.
After a few chuckles at my expense, most of my captors looked away. The new guy, Parry, didn’t. I returned his inspection moment by moment. Tall, dark, and generally very nice to look at in spite of the blue paint. His arrival obviously wasn’t going to help me with my most significant problem of the evening.
Parry stepped towards me. The other students stepped back and let him through without a word. When he stopped in front of me, Parry tucked a knuckle under my chin. He made me look up and meet his eyes. Seconds ticked by with glacial speed and I felt myself blush under his inspection.
Don’t look down, Parry. I repeated those words over and over inside my head, wondering if there was a chance in hell that the universe would do as I commanded for once. Please, don’t look down.
Against everything my luck had taught me to expect from the world, Parry didn’t look down. He turned his attention to the men who made up the party of would-be Celtic warriors instead. “That’s enough, now,” he said. His voice was deep, his Welsh accent very pronounced. “Leave him be for a minute. Let him get his breath back.”
It wasn’t quite an order to untie me and let me go, but I was willing to believe that it wasn’t a bad start. It was possible that Parry would decide I’d breathe easier with my wrists free, right?
Parry turned back to me and caught my eye again.
“But—” someone piped up.
“But nothing. Go on, bugger off, the lot of you.” Parry never looked away from me as he said it.
“But—” the guy tried again.
“Someone’s tapped a barrel of ale by the campfire up there. If you leave now you can get drunk, but if you stand there arguing for much longer, you’ll be left with the dregs.”
“What about him?”
I recognised that voice—it was the guy holding the other end of my rope. I held my breath as I waited for Parry’s verdict.
“I’ll keep an eye on him,” Parry said.
Parry seemed a bit older than the other guys—probably a post-grad student, like me. Maybe that was why the other students did as he said. Maybe it was the lure of the ale. Or maybe it was Parry’s tone—which made it sound like he was making a statement about what would happen next rather than a suggestion. Whatever the reason, the other students didn’t argue further.
I watched them walk away. Through the trees, I could just make out the sight of a campfire in a clearing some way down the sloping side of the hill. The man who’d been holding my rope was the last to leave. He tossed his end of the tether to Parry on the way past and, as he disappeared along the same path the others had taken, I suddenly found myself alone with a new captor.
I looked up and met Parry’s gaze. He had bright blue eyes—the woad brought them out quite beautifully. Bad thought. I looked away before Parry could see anything in my expression that might betray me.
Without warning, Parry stepped forward. I automatically stumbled a step backwards. He took another pace closer to me, and I backed away again. One more move in the odd little dance and something touched my shoulder.
I jerked around. I’d retreated right into to an old gnarled tree trunk. Damn. By the time I looked back towards him, Parry had closed the gap between us even further.
I bit out another curse. My gag once more turned it to gibberish.
“Hush now, bach. I’m not going to hurt you.”
Robbed of my ability to provide a sarcastic response, I raised an eyebrow instead. If I understood the rules of the stupid little war game come university hazing thing properly, then being captured by the enemy meant I was going to have to spend the fortnight before classes started in earnest, doing whatever my captor wanted. So, I was pretty sure my pride was going to take a battering over the next fourteen days, if nothing else.
Parry smiled down at me as if he knew exactly what I was thinking. He was taller than I’d realised, now that he was up close. He was broader across the shoulders too.
“Now tell me,” Parry ordered, his voice dropping to a whisper. “What’s really scaring you. Is it the fact you’re tied up, or the possibility that someone might notice just how much you’re enjoying being tied up?”
Blistering heat rushed to my cheeks. Obviously, the folds of my toga weren’t hiding my hard-on half as well as I’d hoped they were. Awesome.
Parry reached out and tugged at my gag. The strip of fabric slipped from between my lips to hang around my neck.
I took a deep breath, but I didn’t even try to take advantage of the opportunity to speak. I just stared at the leaf-littered ground to Parry’s left and waited to find out what would happen next.
“Gay?” Parry asked.
He didn’t sound homophobic. That alone was a better result than I’d scraped up hope for. While I could, theoretically, think of worse fates than spending two weeks waiting hand and foot on a man who would love to make any gay man’s life a living hell—I couldn’t come up with that many fates which were that much worse.
I offered Parry a cautious nod.
Parry didn’t sneer. He didn’t even take a step back. He took half a step closer instead. “Single?”
Oh… I blinked up at him. Now, that did change things…
I offered Parry another silent nod.
Every time Parry had reduced the gap between us, he’d been looping the rope in his hands, keeping the section between us taut. He put even more tension on it as he took yet another half-step closer to me.
“Out?”
I nodded again. It was pretty much true—I was perfectly willing to be out if the man who had me tied up was gay. I held my breath as I waited for the next question.
“Submissive?”
I’m not sure what I’d expected Parry to ask me at that point, but that wasn’t it. I felt my blush deepen. I nodded again, just once—a movement so tiny I hoped I might be able to get away with denying its existence if I needed to.