by Anne Rice
There was a growing warmth in my chest, pulsing like the slow fire in my cock. But Stefan would never ... But then maybe Nicolas was in higher favor than Stefan!
“He has at last found the slave he desires.” The words were crashing in my head.
But she left me to my own whirling, challenging thoughts in the little room and went out in the dim little hallway and up the dark steps, her burgundy skirts bright in the shadows for only a moment.
MISTRESS LOCKLEY’S DISCIPLINE
BEAUTY HAD almost completed her morning chores in the Captain’s bedchamber when she remembered with a sudden shock her impertinence to Mistress Lockley.
The recollection came to her along with the faint sound of steps advancing towards the door of the Captain’s room from the stairway. She was suddenly terrified. 0, why had she been so insolent! All her resolve to be a bad, bad little girl abandoned her immediately.
The door opened and the pert figure of Mistress Lockley appeared, all fresh linen and lovely blue ribbons, her blouse brought down so low over her mounded breasts that Beauty could almost see the nipples. The most wicked smile was on Mistress Lockley’s exquisite face, and she came right towards Beauty.
Beauty dropped the broom and shrank into the corner.
A low laughter erupted from her Mistress, and at once she had Beauty’s long hair twined around her left hand and with her right hand she picked up the broom and thrust its prickly straws into Beauty’s sex so that Beauty cried and tried to squeeze her legs together.
“My little slave with a tongue!” she said. And Beauty began to sob. But she couldn’t free herself to kiss Mistress Lockley’s boots and she didn’t dare speak. All she could think of was Tristan telling her it would take a lot of courage to be bad all the time!
Mistress Lockley forced her forward on her hands and knees, and Beauty felt the broom between her legs driving her out of the little bedchamber.
“Get down those stairs!” The Mistress said under her breath, her ferocity scorching Beauty’s soul so that she broke into sobs and scurried towards the stairway. She had to stand to descend the stairs, but the broom drove her just as maliciously, plunged into her, tickling and scratching at her tender nether lips as Mistress Lockley came right down behind her.
The Inn was empty, quiet.
“I’ve sent my bad children off to the Punishment Shop for their morning licking so I could tend to you!” came the Mistress’s voice between her tightly clamped jaws. “We’re going to have a little session in how to properly use that tongue when it is called upon to be used! Now into the kitchen!”
Beauty fell to her hands and knees again, desperate to obey, the angry commands pushing her to panic. No one had ever flashed upon her with such withering heat before, and to make matters worse, her sex was already brimming with sensation.
Sunlight filled the large immaculate room, pouring in from the two open doors to the rear yard, striking the fine copper pots and pans that hung from the hooks above, and washing over the iron oven doors in the bricks and the giant rectangular cutting block that stood in the middle of the tile floor, as high and large as the drinking counter outside where Beauty had first been punished.
Mistress Lockley brought her to her feet, and plunging the broom hard between her legs so that its stiff straws lifted her, she forced Beauty back against the cutting block and then lifted her legs so that Beauty quickly scrambled up on the wood that was covered with a light sprinkling of flour.
It was the paddle Beauty expected, and it would be worse than ever before, she knew, with that angry voice driving it. But Mistress Lockley spread Beauty out on her back, drew her hands over her head, and quickly tied them to the edge of the board, telling Beauty to spread her legs or have them spread for her.
Beauty struggled to get her legs wide. The flour on the smooth wood felt silky under her bottom. But her body was being stretched to its full length as her ankles were now tied, and Beauty felt panic again, bouncing helplessly on the smooth unyielding wood as she realized she could not free herself.
In a flurry of soft urgent cries she tried to plead with Mistress Lockley. But the moment she saw Mistress Lockley smiling down at her, Beauty’s voice died in her throat and she bit her lip hard, looking up into the clear black eyes that quivered ever so slightly with laughter.
“The soldiers liked those breasts, didn’t they?” Mistress Lockley said. And reaching with both hands, she pinched Beauty’s nipples between thumb and forefinger. “Answer me!”
“Yes, Mistress,” Beauty wailed, her soul quaking with the sense of her vulnerability to those fingers, the flesh around her nipples shriveling as the nipples themselves hardened to knots. A deep pang between her legs caused her to try to close her legs, when that was quite impossible. “Mistress, please, I will never—”
“Shhhh!” Mistress Lockley clamped her hand over Beauty’s mouth and Beauty arched her back, sobbing against it. 0, it was worse being bound; she could not make herself be still. But she stared at Mistress Lockley with wide eyes and tried to nod, though the hand held her.
“Slaves have no voice,” said the Mistress, “until the Master or Mistress asks to hear that voice, and then you answer with the proper respect.” She let go of Beauty’s mouth.
“Yes, Mistress,” Beauty answered.
The firm fingers took hold of her nipples again. “As I was saying,” Mistress Lockley went on, “the soldiers liked these breasts.”
“Yes, Mistress!” Beauty answered, her voice quavering.
“And this avaricious little mouth.” She reached down and pinched shut the pubic lips so that the moisture overflowed and Beauty felt an itch as it trickled.
“Yes, Mistress,” she answered breathlessly.
Mistress Lockley lifted a white leather belt and showed it to Beauty, like a tongue extending from her hand. And gathering Beauty’s left breast from the top in her left fingers, she bunched the flesh and plumped it as Beauty felt the warmth suffusing her bosom. Beauty couldn’t keep quiet. And the moisture between her legs trickled down into the crack of her buttocks. Her spread-eagle body strained in vain to close itself.
The fingers stretched her left nipple and snapped it. And then the white tongue of the leather belt spanked her breast in a series of hard loud slaps. “O!” Beauty gasped aloud, unable to prevent it. The spanking that the Captain’s large warm hands had given her bosom was nothing like this. The desire to break free and cover her breasts, both of them, was irresistible and impossible! Yet the breast seethed with feeling as never before and Beauty’s body twisted against the wood. The little strap spanked the nipple and the bulging flesh harder and harder.
Beauty was in a frenzy as Mistress Lockley turned her attention to the right breast, plumping it in the same manner, snapping the nipple. Beauty’s cries grew louder, her struggling more violent. The nipple was rock hard under the torrent of licks.
Beauty closed her mouth, sealed it shut. She would have screamed at the top of her lungs, “No, I can’t bear it.” The concentrated blows came faster and faster. Her body became her tortured breasts, her desire fanned by the licks like a torch flame.
Beauty swung her head so violently that the hair streamed over her face. But Mistress Lockley lifted it back and she bent down and looked at Beauty, but Beauty could not look up at her.
“So tumultuous, so exposed!” she said to Beauty, and she kneaded the right breast, pumping it up high again, and then continued to spank it. Beauty gave a high keening scream against her clenched teeth. The fingers tweaked the nipples, massaged the flesh, and the heat roared through Beauty, her hips thrust upwards in a sudden violent convulsion.
“This is how a bad little girl should be punished,” the Mistress said.
“Yes, Mistress,” Beauty sobbed immediately.
Mercifully the fingers were withdrawn. Beauty’s breasts felt huge, heavy, a riot of warm pain and thumping sensation against her. Her low, raw sighs caught in her throat.
And she whimpered when she real
ized what was coming. She could feel Mistress Lockley’s fingers between her legs, pushing the lips apart even as Beauty sought to close herself, the muscles in her legs straining vainly. Her heels thumped the wood, the leather straps pressing into the flesh of her insteps. Again she lost all control, struggling violently in a deluge of tears. But the licking strap was slapping her clitoris. She screamed again at the searing intensity of the mixture of pleasure and pain, her clitoris seeming to harden as never before, the strap snapping up at it over and over as Mistress Lockley swung from beneath the sex with her right hand.
Beauty could feel the lips puffing, the moisture squirting, the slaps sounding wetter and wetter. Her head rolled on the wood; she cried louder and louder, her hips riding up to meet the strap, her whole sex a formless explosion of fire in her.
The strap stopped. It was worse, the heat rising, the tingling like an itch that must somehow find its divine friction. Beauty’s breath came in short imploring pants in time with her moans, and through her tears she saw Mistress Lockley looking down at her.
“Are you my impertinent slave?” she asked.
“Your devoted slave,” Beauty choked through her tears, “Mistress. Your devoted slave.” And she bit her lip, grimacing, praying it was the right answer.
Her breasts another sex were boiling with the heat, and she heard her hips spanking the wood beneath them, though she had no awareness of moving them. Through the mist of tears she saw the Mistress’s pretty black eyes, the black hair with its fancy little braid over the crown of the head, and the breasts swelling so beautifully in the snow-white linen blouse with its thick ruffle. But the Mistress was holding something in her hands. What was it? It was moving.
And Beauty saw it was a big, pretty white cat that stared at her with almond-shaped blue eyes in that wide, inquisitive manner cats have, its pink tongue licking its black nose in a quick gesture.
A wave of absolute shame overcame Beauty. She writhed on the board, a helpless and suffering creature, even more lowly than this proud, disdainful little beast that peered at her from the Mistress’s arms with jeweled eyes. But the Mistress had bent down, apparently to reach for something.
And Beauty saw her rise again with a thick dab of yellow cream on her fingers. The fingers smeared the cream to Beauty’s throbbing nipples and dabbed it between her legs so that it dripped and slid in dollops into her vagina.
“Just butter, my sweet, fresh butter,” said the Mistress. “No perfumed ointments here.” And suddenly she dropped the cat on all fours on Beauty’s tender belly and chest, and Beauty felt the soft pads of the cat’s feet moving up her chest with maddening quickness.
She squirmed, pulled on the straps. The little beast had dipped its head, and the rough, sandy little tongue was eating at her nipple, devouring the butter that covered it. Some deep, deep, hitherto unknown fear made itself known, sending Beauty into wilder and wilder struggles.
But the indifferent little monster with its exquisite white face ate on and on, the nipple exploding under the licks, and Beauty’s whole body went tense, lifting itself off the wood and thudding down again.
The creature was lifted, taken to the right breast, and Beauty pulled with all her strength on the straps, the sobs shaking out of her, the little hind feet padding deeply into her belly, the soft stomach hairs of the cat brushing her as the tongue lapped again, cleaning the nipple thoroughly.
Beauty clenched her teeth not to scream the word “No,” her eyes squeezing shut again, only to open on the sight of the heart-shaped face dipping down in short quick movements as the tongue lapped, the nipple pushed back and forth by the strength of the sandy lick, the sensation so exquisite, so dreadful, that Beauty screamed louder than she had ever screamed under the paddle.
But the cat was being lifted. Beauty thrashed from side to side, clenching her teeth harder on the “No” that must not come out as she felt those silky ears and that fur between her legs, and the tongue darting at her distended clitoris. “0, but please, no, no,” she screamed in the sanctuary of her mind, even as the pleasure jetted through her, mingling with the loathing of the hairy little feline and its horrid mindless feasting. Her hips froze in the air, inches above the wood, the furry nose and mouth pushing deeper and deeper into her. No more tongue on the clitoris, just the maddening brushing of the top of the head against it, and it wasn’t enough, it wasn’t enough. 0, the little monster!
To her utter shame and defeat, Beauty struggled to press her pubis against the creature, to press on the little skull, to make it stroke the clitoris with the slightest pressure. But the tongue had gone down lower, lapping the base of her vagina, lapping the crack of her buttocks, and her sex hungered vainly as the pleasure passed into a high-pitched torment.
Beauty gritted her teeth and shook her head about as the tongue lapped at her pubic hair, as it took what it wanted, oblivious to the desire that racked her.
And when she thought she could stand it no more, that she would go mad, the cat was lifted away. It peered down at her from Mistress Lockley’s arms, the Mistress smiling just as sweetly as the cat smiled, it seemed, above her.
“Witch!” Beauty thought, but she did not dare to speak, and she closed her eyes, her sex quivering with all the desire she had ever known collected in it.
Mistress Lockley released the cat. It was gone, out of sight. And Beauty felt the straps on her wrists released, and then the straps on her ankles.
She lay shuddering, resisting with all her will the desire to close her legs, to turn over on the board, hugging her breasts with one hand while with the other she touched her burning sex in an orgy of private pleasure.
There would be no such mercy for her.
“Get down on your hands and knees,” said Mistress Lockley. “I think you’re finally ready for the paddle.”
Beauty climbed to the floor.
And in confusion she turned to hurry after the little boots that were already far away as they clicked sharply out of the kitchen.
The movement of her legs as she crawled only intensified the craving in her.
And when they reached the counter in the front room of the Inn, she climbed up at once to the snap of Mistress Lockley’s fingers.
People were passing back and forth in the square; they chatted at the rim of the well. Two village girls came in with a cheerful hello to Mistress Lockley as they proceeded past her into the kitchen.
Beauty lay shuddering, her little cries like stutters, her chin propped, her buttocks waiting for the paddle.
“You remember I told you I’d cook your buttocks for breakfast!” Mistress Lockley said in that cold, toneless voice.
“Yes, Mistress!” Beauty sobbed.
“No words from you now. Only the nod of that head!”
Beauty nodded, despite her propped head, furiously.
Her sore breasts were pure warmth against the wood, her sex dripping. The tension was unbearable.
“You’ve been well sauced in your own juices,” Mistress Lockley asked, “now, haven’t you?”
Beauty gave forth a loud whimpering wail, not knowing how to answer.
Mistress Lockley’s hand kneaded her buttocks hard, plumped them as she had done the breasts.
And then they came, the hard punishing spanks, and Beauty bounced and writhed and cried behind her teeth as if she had never known resistance, dignity. Anything to please this dreadful, cold, uncompromising Mistress, anything to make her know Beauty would be good, she wasn’t a bad girl, she had been all wrong. And Tristan had warned her. The spanking went on and on, truly chastising her.
“Is that hot enough, is that well done enough?!” the Mistress demanded, driving the paddle ever faster and faster. She stopped and laid her cool open hand on the blazing skin. “Yes, I think we have a nice well-done little Princess!”
And she flailed again, Beauty’s sobs pouring as if they had been purged out of her.
And the thought that she must wait till evening, wait for the Captain before her tormented s
ex would know its release, brought the sobs out of her in almost luscious abandon.
It was over. The cracks still rang in her ears. She could still feel the paddle as if in a dream. And her sex was like a hollow chamber in which all the pleasures she had known left their loud, reverberating echo. And it would be hours and hours before the Captain came. Hours and hours ...
“Get up and get down on your knees,” Mistress Lockley had just said. Why was she hesitating?
She dropped to the floor and pressed her lips frantically to Mistress Lockley’s boots, kissing the sharp little points of the toes, the shapely little ankles showing beneath the fine casing of leather. She felt Mistress Lockley’s petticoats on her damp forehead and on the hair, and her kisses became all the more fervent.
“Now you’ll work to clean this Inn from top to bottom,” Mistress Lockley said, “and you’ll keep your legs wide apart as you do it.”
Beauty nodded.
Mistress Lockley walked away from her towards the Inn door. “Where are my other lovelies?” she murmured crossly under her breath. “The Punishment Shop takes forever.”
Beauty knelt looking at Mistress Lockley’s fine little figure against the light of the door, the tiny waist so flattered by the white band and sash of the apron. Beauty sniffled. “Tristan, you were right,” she thought. “It’s hard to be bad all the time.” And she wiped her nose on the back of her hand silently.
The big white slinky cat came round, padding into view only inches from Beauty. And she shrank back, biting her lip again, and then she covered her head with her arms, because Mistress Lockley was just idly leaning on the Inn door, and the great furry cat was coming closer and closer.
CONVERSATION WITH PRINCE RICHARD
IT WAS late afternoon. Beauty lay on the cool grass with the other slaves, stirred only now and then by the prodding stick of one of the kitchen girls, who forced her legs apart roughly. Yes, she must not press her legs together, she thought drowsily.
