Unraveled by Her

by Wendy Leigh

  I refuse to let my memories of Tamara and Georgiana and the kidnapping, or, worse still, my knowledge that Georgiana is still alive, deprive me of what I crave so passionately.

  “Please, R—Master,” I say, and look at him pleadingly.

  He lights a cigarette.

  “This particular—what shall I call it—situation, for want of a better word, is something I first encountered in a fantasy parlor on Sunset Plaza Drive in Los Angeles and with which I swiftly became enamored. So I commissioned it to be installed in all my dungeons, with the intention of one day subjecting Geor—” he hesitates for a moment, then goes on, “Georgiana to it.”

  “But did you ever?” I ask, my heart in my mouth.

  “Of course not. In any event, it’s probably an excessively harsh and cruel punishment,” he says.

  Excessively harsh and cruel. I should love nothing better than to submit to the challenge of Robert subjecting me to something excessively harsh and cruel. Physically, of course, but not emotionally. And only now can I submit to that because I’m now finally utterly and completely secure in his love for me.

  “Show me, Master, please, just so that I can think about it,” I say, excited to the max.

  “Ah, but that’s exactly what I want to avoid you doing, Miranda,” he says, his eyes alight with excitement, and I can tell that although he wants to protect me, and to be fair to me, deep down he can’t wait to show me Dungeon 2’s secret and to tantalize me with it for as long as he can.

  “Please, Master,” I say.

  He rolls his eyes at me and says, “Very well, Miranda. You’re still owed some chair time, though. But afterward, you’ll get what you want, I promise.”

  Then he blindfolds me once more, and I sit there in the Falcon Chair, my legs tied wide apart, my arms raised high, and my breasts pendulous.

  First he fondles me all over, and I thrill at the touch of his heavy hands, first over my stomach, then up the side of my body, then under each of my arms in turn, then up and down each arm, in rapid movements, then over my swelling breasts.

  As his hands approach my nipples, I tense, but he slides his fingers over them softly, and I purr. Then he fingers my pubic mound and after that inserts his fingers inside of me, while I moan and wriggle as much as my bonds allow.

  “Keep still, or it will be worse for you,” he says, and even though I know it isn’t going to be that much worse for me (because he told me so, and I know he would never lie to me), I obey him and keep stock-still.

  Then I hear the sound of his knees hitting the floor, and I wish to God that I weren’t blindfolded, so that I could savor the sight of Robert Hartwell, the celebrated, the famous, the sophisticated, the most masculine of all men, on his knees in front of me.

  He grips each of my thighs hard, then very slowly licks from my pubic mound to my vagina and back again, then around my clitoris, over it, then inside of me.

  And as I feel the moisture rushing out of me, I’m suddenly glad that he’s tied me up, because otherwise, I probably would instinctively close my legs, so that he couldn’t burrow so deep into me with his tongue.

  I am so wet, so hot, so close to coming, and the way in which he thrusts not one but two of his fingers into me, then out again, with a powerful rhythm, causes my orgasm to reach a powerful crescendo.

  Then, as suddenly as he started he stops, and I feel a stab of disappointment.

  I hear him walk away from me, go to the bar, and then the pop of a champagne cork.

  Soon he is by my side again and feeds me champagne, and I down it in one gulp.

  He removes the blindfold and then reties it, only slightly tighter this time.

  And then I feel the tickle of a feather across my feet, so lightly that I don’t even flinch.

  Then he moves it higher over my stomach, then back down across my thighs, up them, down them, and then up again to my nipples, while I whimper with the delicate pleasure of it all.

  “You can’t know how beautiful you look tied up like this, Miranda,” he says, and his voice is deep and husky with desire.

  Then, in sharp contrast, a chill shoots through my flesh: ice! He is rubbing an ice cube over my clitoris, while I let out a scream of shock.

  “Hush, I’m not hurting you at all,” he says, and for a second I almost believe him.

  Then he replaces the cold of the ice cube with the heat of his tongue, then the ice cube again, then his tongue, and alternates heat and ice again and again, while the ice bucket clanks every time he removes a cube from it, and I am almost insensible with pleasure.

  Then he stops abruptly and moves away from me.

  While I sit there, tied to the chair, blindfolded, feeling disoriented, aroused, and, as always, passionately in love with him.

  He removes the blindfold from my eyes.

  “Now, Miranda, I’m a man of my word. I promised to reveal the secret of Dungeon Two to you, and so now I will,” he says, his eyes burning hot and intense.

  I try to stay calm, try not to show how thrilled I am, how turned on yet terrified, but knowing Robert, I’m sure that my every shifting emotion hasn’t escaped him.

  Then he unties me, hands me a robe, and leads me to the middle of the room.

  And rolls back the scarlet Aubusson carpet to reveal a large gold ring embedded in the floor underneath it.

  He motions me to move back a few yards, and I do.

  “This, Miranda, is the Pit, the ultimate punishment inflicted on a consistently disobedient submissive, and one that is guaranteed to improve her attitude considerably,” he says, and I blink at him, because I really don’t understand.

  Then he pulls back the ring and lifts up an eight-foot-square trapdoor—with countless air holes bored into it—to reveal steps leading down to an eight-foot-square underground cell.

  I look up at him questioningly.

  “No, my darling, not now. And probably not ever,” he says, then takes me by the hand, leads me over to the couch, and pours us both champagne.

  Then clinks his glass against mine.

  “I never want to be parted from you in this lifetime,” he says, and the look of iron determination on his face—as well as the strength, the power, and the confidence in his voice—makes me want to melt into him and stay there forever. I just pray that if and when he finally learns that Georgiana is still alive, he won’t fall in love with her again and leave me. Then, horror of all horrors, she will have gotten exactly what she wants, and won.

  Don’t think of her, Miranda. Don’t. She is probably hiding out in England, or South Africa or somewhere else, thousands of miles away from here. She can’t hurt you anymore.

  I push the thought of her out of my mind, and concentrate, instead, on Robert’s words.

  “But if circumstances ever dictate that we are compelled to spend a few days apart, you might want to remember what I’m about to tell you—my answer to your question regarding the secret of Dungeon Two—and that should serve to help you satisfy yourself when I’m not there to do it for you,” he says.

  A fantasy, Robert is about to give me a fantasy!

  Chapter Fifteen

  As always, he is one step ahead of me, one of his most irritating yet most magical talents. He says, “I don’t usually deal in sex fantasies, simply because I have the drive, the desire, and the means to make my fantasies reality. So for me, the majority of my fantasies are simply plans. Just not this one. Not for you,” he says, as he slips one finger inside me, then two more and fucks me with them, relentlessly.

  “It’s very simple. Simple, but harsh, perhaps even cruel,” he says, and, on the word “cruel” thrusts his fingers into me hard.

  I can’t wait to hear it, but what he’s doing to me right now makes it almost impossible for me to focus on his words.

  “Now concentrate and imagine yourself in this position,” he says, then
under his breath murmurs, “Not that you will ever be . . .”

  Meanwhile, I sit up straight and wait for him to begin.

  “Picture this. As my submissive, on one particular day, you displease me immeasurably. First, I bend you over a whipping bench, then punish you unmercifully, to the point of tears,” he says, and deep inside, I give thanks that Robert has helped me release my inhibitions about emotion and that one day, when he decides the time is ripe, and we are in the dungeon together, he will punish me and I shall cry for him without holding back.

  “But although you are sobbing, abject, contrite, I decide that a mere whipping wasn’t sufficient to demonstrate to you the error of your ways, so I bring you in here, to Dungeon Two,” he says.

  I gulp.

  “Now I want you to consider whether or not you will ever be equal to experiencing the cruel and unusual punishment I am prepared to detail to you next,” he says, with another hard thrust of his fingers inside me. So hard, so deep, that I can’t but moan.

  I can only nod in answer.

  He gives me one last penetrating look, and his eyes level with mine for an inordinately long time. Finally, he clears his throat and says, “Imagine this, then; you are sore, contrite, almost broken. I ignore your distress, and then I order you into the Pit. And you comply.”

  “Can I try it, please, Master, just for a minute, just to see what it feels like, locked down there?” I say.

  “I was afraid you’d ask me to put you down there,” he says, and I can tell that while he was genuinely afraid that I would, part of him hoped for it.

  “Just for a few minutes, please, Master, please!” I say.

  “I can’t deny you anything, Miranda,” he says, then gets up off the couch, pulls me up behind him, and in one swift gesture strips me of my robe so that I stand beside him, naked.

  “Seven minutes, just so that you can learn and then imagine how it will feel for you to be relegated to the Pit as punishment, and then you will always remember . . .” he says, and points to the steps.

  I start to shake from head to foot with a combination of terror and erotic excitement, but still start down the narrow steps.

  For a split second I hesitate and—just as Robert already has—I ask myself whether I should really be doing this so soon after my ordeal at the hands of Georgiana and Tamara, who, after all, had me trapped in their equivalent of the Pit.

  Probably not, but at the same time, I am so caught up in the thrill of the moment, the trancelike effect of being in Robert’s power, to such a degree that I long for him to subject me to this, and there is no way in the universe that I am going to back out.

  And certainly not because of Georgiana. I refuse to allow her shadow to defeat or control me, or to mar my excitement or curtail my exploration of BDSM in every rainbow color, light and dark.

  At the bottom of the stairs, there is hardly enough room for me to stand upright, so I squat on the floor and gaze up at Robert, suddenly overcome by a sense of shame at my own abjectness.

  “Are you sure you can handle this?” he says.

  I’m not, but hell will freeze over before I back down from a challenge.

  “I was never surer of anything in my life,” I say.

  “Just a taste. Just seven minutes,” he says, his voice hoarse and even lower than usual.

  And then he shuts the trapdoor above my head with a bang and leaves me crouched on the floor of the Pit, in the darkness.

  After only a couple of minutes, I already feel light-headed, faint, yet somehow elated.

  Each second in there feels like an hour.

  The silence around me is deafening.

  Then I hear thunder crash above my head.

  Only it’s not thunder.

  It’s Robert, striding across the dungeon floor.

  Is he moving toward the trapdoor?

  Or away from it?

  I’m not sure.

  All I know is that down here, in the punishment Pit, naked and alone, I understand more forcibly than ever that when it comes to my sexuality, I, Miranda Stone, really am two women.

  The first hopes desperately that Robert’s footsteps will come closer and closer to the trapdoor, and that any minute now he will open it and release me.

  But the second woman hopes with all her might that his footsteps are moving farther and farther from the trapdoor, and that he will leave me locked in the Pit for many more minutes than seven.

  Which woman will gain the upper hand? A conundrum. And one which could take an entire lifetime for me to understand.

  In the interim, I wait down in the Pit, in total silence.

  And the minutes feel like hours, days, weeks.

  Then the trapdoor opens and the Pit is flooded by light.

  Robert reaches down to help me up, and I fling myself into his arms.

  “Too harsh and cruel for you, Miranda?” he says when he’s stopped kissing and hugging me, and together we sit on the couch again.

  “I don’t think so,” I say, but am not really altogether sure.

  He gives me one of his piercing looks, the kind that makes me feel as if he can see beneath my skin.

  “Probably not. But then you’ve only experienced the first half of the Pit punishment, not the second,” he says.

  And I blanch.

  “So would you like me to tell you about the rest of it?” he says, and plunges his fingers into me, while I nod, all big eyes and pounding heart.

  With his fingers up inside me, he thrusts, twists, turns, and moves them sometimes straight up, sometimes more to the right, sometimes forward, sometimes slightly backward, while he pleasures me, finger-fucks me, and through it all talks up an erotic storm.

  “Imagine this, Miranda: fifteen minutes in the pit, not seven. You down there, naked, alone, in silence, with nothing to occupy you but your own thoughts, your own realization of what and who you really are.”

  “And just as you sink into that silence, that darkness, that consciousness of who you really are, what you really are, and what you really want, you hear footsteps directly above you. Footsteps that stomp over the trapdoor above your head.”

  “Like before,” I manage to say, just as he pauses for a fraction in finger-fucking me.

  He flashes me his most dominant look.

  “Not exactly,” he says.

  And I look at him questioningly.

  “Because those footsteps won’t just belong to me, but to someone else, as well. To another beautiful woman, but one who is not nearly as beautiful as you.”

  Much as the prospect terrifies me, I feel the orgasm build within me stronger, faster, deeper, and totally against my will.

  “And while you cower in the Pit, naked and alone, you will hear the sound of me bending that woman over the couch. Then the sound of a crop on her naked flesh. Then her cries, first of pain, then, when I start fucking her, cries of ecstasy.

  “And fuck her, I do. While you, Miranda, are in the Pit, in the dark, picturing in every detail exactly what I am doing to another woman, and hearing every bit of it, and suffering all alone down in the Pit,” he says.

  “That’s really sadistic,” I say.

  “Of course it is,” he says, and then, with a knowing smile, he plunges his fingers deep into me, then adds, “And the fact that fantasizing about it gets you so wet is really masochistic.”

  He’s right.

  “Of course it is, Master,” I say, and he rewards me with his all-conquering Robert Hartwell smile.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The next day at breakfast, Robert asks whether I’ve ever walked a labyrinth—an ancient and intricate walkway stamped on concrete on the ground, but without walls.

  I know that Georgiana walked the labyrinth in the castle grounds on practically a daily basis. The thought of literally following in her footsteps is unthink
able to me.

  “A labyrinth is almost older than time, darling. I first walked one in Chartres Cathedral when I was very young and unhappy, and somehow, the act of putting one foot in front of the other, focusing hard so that I didn’t cross the lines, miraculously put me into a meditative state,” he says.

  Robert, the ultimate man of action, meditating?

  I find it difficult to believe.

  But then he’s so many things, so much the Renaissance man, that I shouldn’t be at all surprised that he’s spiritual as well.

  “I found that state eminently healing. And problem solving, as well. Which is why I’ve walked the labyrinth’s path every day since I first bought the castle and had one installed here,” he finishes.

  So it isn’t there because of Georgiana at all . . .

  “I think it might be good for you to walk it, after . . .” he says, then jumps up, “Let’s take a walk there together, and I’ll show you.”

  I follow him, and while we stroll down to the labyrinth, he gives me a brief lesson on its significance.

  “The labyrinth dates back to prehistoric times, when it was believed that the strange pattern was designed in order to trap evil spirits,” he says, and two images swim before my eyes, one dead, one very much alive. I am overcome with the wish that I could trap both of them in the labyrinth to rot in hell.

  “One of the best and most famous examples is in Crete, in the palace of Knossos. It was designed for King Minos to contain the minotaur,” he adds, just as we arrive at the edge of the labyrinth, where he points out the intricate pattern, and the heart of it, at the center.

  “It’s like the petals of a flower, isn’t it? Start at the entrance, and then tell the universe what you need, what you want, ask the question to which you need an answer, take a deep breath, and start walking. And when you reach the center, and the mood takes you, spend a few minutes standing on one of the petals and enjoy the moment. Then walk back to the entrance again. By the time I get there, I often find that the answer to my question has come to me,” he says.