He said, “I'm not what you think I am. The sooner you learn that, the better off you'll be.”
He reached for the sash that secured her empire-waist wrapper.
Bewildered by this sudden turn of events, she instinctively tried to push him away. Rexton captured her hands, raised them over her head, and snapped the wrist cuffs together through one of the handles on the urn.
He untied the sash and whipped open the wrapper, leaving her naked and exposed. With one hand, he kneaded a breast; with the other, he unbuttoned his trousers. The shock of his hot, rough palm on her bare flesh made her sex throb wildly. Being bound was a relief, just as it had been during the Inspection of the Slaves. This would happen with or without her cooperation; she was helpless to resist.
“Tell me to stop.” He crushed her to the bedpost, his erection like hot steel against her belly, its tip damp.
Oh, God, don't stop, she thought as she struggled not to rub against him. Don't stop, don't stop.
“You bought me, my lord,” she said shakily. “You may do as you wish.”
“What do you wish?”
“I . . . I have no wishes.”
He slid a hand down her belly, and lower still. She sucked in a breath as he glided a finger between the lips of her sex and along the inflamed, slippery flesh within. Her hips jerked forward of their own volition.
“I think you do have wishes,” he murmured into her ear as he caressed her. “Dark desires you're too cowardly to confess, even to yourself. You'd rather play the slave than sully yourself by admitting them. Is that not right, Miss Keating?”
“I . . .” She hadn't thought it through like that. She'd been reacting, not thinking.
“Answer me.” He lifted her, holding her against the post as he stood in the cradle of her thighs, his sex nudging hers. “You want me to take you, use you, as a master uses his slave. Don't you? Answer me.”
Damn him for doing this to her—and damn her, for letting him crawl into her mind this way.
“No indignant denial, eh? Well, then, if you are my slave, Miss Keating, that would make me your master, would it not?”
“Please, my lord. P-please, I . . .”
He pressed into her just slightly, enough so that she could feel the broad, smooth head of his organ stretching her open. “Do you want me to fuck you, slave?”
It wasn't a want, it was a need. She was consumed with it, shaking with it.
“Say it,” he commanded.
“Don't make me. Please don't make me.”
“That's answer enough.” He drove into her hard, sheathing himself with one lubricious thrust. She cried out at the abrupt impalement, feeling a burning, impossible fullness, a sense of utter possession.
He took her with deep, grinding thrusts that she met eagerly, hips bucking against his. Every sharp plunge forced a low, feral growl from his chest.
“Don't look at me,” he panted.
She turned her head. “Yes, my lor—”
“Don't talk to me. Don't make a fucking sound.”
She bit her lip to keep from moaning as her pleasure mounted higher, higher . . . The enforced silence seemed to amplify it, so that when her climax hit, she screamed with the force of it.
He shouted hoarsely, his fingers digging painfully into her flesh. She felt spasm after spasm as he shot his seed, and then he collapsed against her, limp and damp, his hair stuck to his forehead. He sucked in air as if he'd just finished a footrace. One of his breaths emerged as a faint groan that struck Caroline as being filled with misery.
He straightened up, his gaze lighting on hers. He looked away quickly, but Caroline had seen something raw and unguarded in his eyes that provoked in her a grudging pity, despite how he was treating her.
When he uncoupled, it felt as if her insides were being pulled right out of her. He lowered her legs, buttoned his trousers, donned a double-breasted gray waistcoat over his shirt, rinsed off his face, and combed his hair. Only then did he detach her wrist cuffs so that she could lower her arms.
Caroline tugged her wrapper closed and knotted the sash with unsteady hands. Rexton retied the cravat, getting it right on the first try this time, put on a coat similar to the one he'd worn the day before, and crossed to the door. “I'm going down to breakfast. Be dressed when I get back.”
He swung the door open and stood with his back to her for a moment, his hand on the knob. “Wear the lace chemise. With nothing under it.”
He slammed the door so hard it felt like a punch in the stomach. Caroline heard the click of his key in the lock.
Eight
TODAY'S DIVERTISSEMENT WILL be blindman's buff,” Mr. Llewellyn announced at the conclusion of afternoon tea in le Salon Bleu. “All are welcome to join in, however masters should be advised that any slave who takes part may be enjoyed by one or more gentlemen during this little frolic. Participating slaves are therefore required to wear the Black Hearts to indicate their availability. They are also required to be unclothed, although they may retain their stockings, slippers, and gloves if it pleases you.”
From the corner of his eye as he reclined on an indigo velvet armchair with his cigar and snifter of brandy, Rexton saw Caroline, sitting on the floor with her hands clasped behind her neck, steal a furtive glance at him. He ignored her so as to let her fret for a few moments. Llewellyn's afternoon games always devolved into an orgy of one stripe or another, and being made to serve other men was Caroline's worst fear.
Two days ago—it was the afternoon of their second day as master and slave—they'd come upon a hooded slave tied to a garden arch, the Black Heart dangling from her collar. Two men were taking her fore and aft, while a third knelt before her, fucking her mouth hard and fast. The man on top of her slapped her arse with every thrust; the one below squeezed her breasts as if they were putty. Four other men stood and watched, stroking themselves through their breeches as they waited their turn.
“My lord!” Caroline had exclaimed, in rare defiance of the injunction against speaking out of turn.“Do something. Make them stop.”
“I've no call to. They don't appear to be abusing her.”
“That's not abuse?” She was shaking in outrage.
“She agreed to this sort of treatment when she signed her slave contract—as did you.”
“Yes, but I never realized it could be so . . . so . . .” She shook her head, evidently at a loss for words to express her revulsion. “I can't imagine what that poor woman is going through right now.”
“If I know her, she's in heaven,” Rexton said. “That's Lady Beckinridge. Narcissa,” he added in response to Caroline's puzzled look. He would recognize that lissome alabaster body anywhere. “I happen to know she likes it rough—very rough. I wouldn't be surprised if she specifically requested this.”
“Impossible.”
“Oh, look,” Rexton had said. “I do believe she's coming.”
Next to being shared with other men, buggery was what Caroline most feared Rexton would demand before the week was over. With those two exceptions, there didn't seem to be much in the way of sexual activity that Caroline found genuinely distasteful. Over the course of the past three days, he had subjected her to the kinds of acts that most men only experience in their darkest imaginings.
He had made liberal use of the contents of the black leather box and of the various commands she'd been taught to obey, starting the day he'd fucked her against the bedpost. That evening after dinner, he told her to strip, then to lay a blanket over the bed. “Wouldn't want to ruin that beautiful counterpane.” He delivered this command calmly, quietly, having cooled down considerably from his earlier wrath. She did as commanded, albeit with a good deal of reluctance as regarded the disrobing. Her modesty was absurd, of course. She had an exquisite body, with a tiny waist and full, high breasts. “Supine,” he ordered, pointing to the bed.
Once she was on her back with her legs spread, he retrieved four lengths of chain and four padlocks from the black box and secured her hand and
foot to the bedposts. He took a silver tray from the drinks cabinet and laid it out with a few carefully chosen selections from the box—the tortoiseshell dildo, ivory cock ring, nipple pinchers, and olive oil. This he set on the bed between her outspread legs, and then he took his time undressing and washing up as she lay there trembling. He didn't mind the trembling, but he didn't much care for the way those big, nervous eyes followed him around the room, so he blindfolded her with one of the black silk cravats before he uncorked the bottle of oil. She shook in earnest then—until she discovered that that which gave him pleasure served her in equal measure.
They both slept in that big bed now, but he'd taken to ordering her to turn in while he sat on the balcony and drank himself insensible; it was the only way he could get to sleep anymore. When he awakened during the night, always with a fixed bayonet despite his lingering drunkenness, he would roll her onto her back, or more often, onto her stomach with her arse propped up on pillows and her legs spread as wide as he could get them—though last night he'd simply straddled her face and shoved his cock in her mouth.
She kept him in a state of constant, excruciating arousal. He took her three, four, five times a day. He'd taken her in the bathhouse, the woods, and various rooms of the château, though never in the company of others. Twice, he'd made her kneel and fellate him through the mouth hole of the black velvet hood, after hooking it onto her slave collar. He often employed the leather bindings and chains, and almost always the hood or a blindfold, except when he was taking her from behind.
On no occasion, no matter what he did to her, had Caroline resisted him. Once she—and for that matter, he—had gotten over the initial strangeness of regarding each other as master and slave, it was as if she had surrendered not just her body, but all those ladylike inhibitions and scruples that she had lugged here with her. She embraced his escalating sexual demands with a level of enthusiasm that Rexton found fiercely arousing—but unnerving as well. It was starting to feel almost as if she could anticipate his desires, feel what he felt, be exactly what he wanted her to be. Were she some vacuous little nit, he might think she was just being blindly obedient, but she was far from vacuous, and her reactions were not those of a mindless slave, however much she purported to embrace the role.
Theirs was a complex and increasingly intimate relationship, and that was the problem. The last thing on earth that Rexton wanted was a relationship of any kind, much less with a woman who consumed his every waking thought, who inspired him to do things he'd never imagined he would do, to act upon desires that, until now, had been hiding in the darkest recesses of his mind. It was he who should be wielding the whip hand, not she.
He didn't like it. Over the past couple of days, he'd found himself contriving excuses to mistreat her in the hope of driving a wedge through the center of this thing that held them in its grip.
Yesterday evening, he'd ordered her to “await,” then left her in the room while he went downstairs to dinner. When he came back and found her no longer bent over with her hands on her legs, he'd put her over his knee and spanked her till that pert little ass of hers was scalding pink and they were both on the verge of spending. He made her beg him to fuck her, and then, to prolong her punishment, he refused. Instead, he ordered her to “kneel down,” clipped her wrist cuffs to her ankle cuffs, and stood over her while he worked himself off. He'd left her there, with his come drying on her back, while he joined some of the other men in a game of whist that lasted past midnight. “
Our blindman's buff differs from the childhood pastime with which you are all familiar,” said Mr. Llewellyn as a team of footmen moved the furniture to the edges of the big room.“In our version, the blindfolded player is always one of the gentlemen. The order of play is determined beforehand by choosing cards. The slaves are the blindman's prey, and they are permitted, in fact encouraged, to attempt to elude him. One by one, each blindman will endeavor to capture a slave other than his own, whom he must then attempt to identify by whatever means he chooses to employ.”
Rexton regarded Caroline with a look of feigned speculation as he idly fondled his Black Heart. She kept her gaze fixed on Mr. Llewellyn, Rexton having trained her never to look directly at him, but rather to keep her eyes lowered when they were speaking. She could see him, though. She would be wondering if the time had come when she would finally be compelled to publicly disrobe and allow other men to have their way with her.
He hadn't yet forced her to get naked in front of the others, although the attire he chose for her was invariably, in his estimation, a damn sight more provocative than simple nudity. This afternoon she wore nothing on top but rattling masses of faux pearl and diamond necklaces, which more or less concealed her breasts. From the waist down, she was clad in pantaloons of transparent black netting fashioned, like lady's underdrawers,with the crotch split from front to back. However, unlike the open slit in drawers, it was secured with a row of little ball buttons about the size of pearls, made of black jet glass.
“At no time during this game,” Mr. Llewellyn continued, “are the slaves permitted to speak, even if one of the gentlemen asks her a direct question. As I said, a slave may use every means at her disposal to avoid being captured, but once the blindman touches her, she must immediately surrender and obey his every command. The blindman, who must retain his blindfold, has ten minutes to identify his prey by name—ten minutes and no more. To make things a bit more interesting, every gentleman who manages to correctly name the slave in question when his ten minutes are up will have his own name put into a hat. After dinner, I shall choose one of those names, and that lucky gentleman will have the use of the entire corps of participating slaves as his private harem for two hours following dinner tonight.”
The roomful of men murmured excitedly as they placed bets with one another as to who the lucky sultan would be.
Holding up his pocket watch, Llewellyn said, “I shall keep track of the time. The game will be over when every gentleman has taken his turn. And now, will the participating slaves please remove any garments they might be wearing and gather in the center of the room?”
Rexton said, “Rose.” He still called her “Miss Keating” in private, and she addressed him by his title. He preferred this, lest she find comfort in hiding behind a false identity.
Her gaze shot to him, then dropped to the floor. “Yes, master,” she said in a soft, slightly trembling voice.
“Come.” Setting aside his brandy and cigar, he patted his leg. She leapt up with a look of relief and sat on his lap. He drew her back against his chest, where she settled with her head on his shoulder. The only other nonparticipating slave in the room was Elle, lounging on a silken couch next to Jack Compton, Lord Cutbridge, while Lili lay with her head in his lap. Lili had elected not to be re-auctioned after taking her leave of Dunhurst, choosing instead to form a ménage à trois with Cutbridge and Elle that had made Cutbridge the envy of the other men.
The man who chose the ace of spades, and therefore the first man to wear the blindfold, to the jubilation of his fellow Unattached Gentlemen, was Sir Edmund Byrde. His friend, Lord Dunhurst, offered words of encouragement as Llewellyn tied the blindfold over Byrde's eyes.
Dunhurst himself had been prohibited from taking part in any more games, either as a player or a bettor, after the slaves' footrace two days ago. He had wagered a thousand quid on the tall, sturdy Saffron to win, but hampered by the ill-fitting men's riding boots that Thomas Quirk made her wear, she came in fourth. Dunhurst raised that ridiculous walking stick of his with the aim of striking the poor girl with it, but she was too quick for him, and sidestepped the blow. The incident nevertheless enraged Quirk, who prevailed upon Rexton to ban Dunhurst from all future group activities. Rexton had been only too happy to oblige.
Byrde made his way haltingly toward the middle of the room, arms stretched in front of him, as the slaves stumbled over each other to get away. After a few minutes of this, several of the men, in an effort to hurry things along, starte
d shouting out clues as to the whereabouts of the slaves. “About six feet in front of you, Eddie.” “They're mostly to your left.” “Right behind you!” Byrde turned and snatched a handful of Iris's coppery mane.
His audience cheered and applauded as he squeezed her bum and fondled her breasts. “Who the devil are you?” he asked, although she was, of course, forbidden to answer him, and none of the other men was about to enlighten him; why increase competition for the harem? By now, Byrde had a stiff that so strained the fall front of his breeches, it was a wonder the fabric didn't split from the pressure.
“You're quite a slender thing,” he said, “so you might be Angelique. If so, you'll have a nice, tight, wet little notch. I've heard your master singing its praises. We shall see about that. Kneel down—facing away from me.”
She lowered herself to the floor with her cheek on the carpet, her hands clasped behind her neck, and her dainty little arse raised high. Dropping to his knees behind her, Sir Edmund felt about until he located her quim, which he probed thoughtfully.
Rexton shifted Caroline a bit so that she wasn't pressing uncomfortably against his own erection. Her breathing had quickened, he noticed, and that telltale flush of arousal was forming on her chest. He rested a hand on her sex, which felt hot and swollen through the tissue-thin silk of her pantaloons.
She stiffened as if she might try to rise up. He banded an arm around her waist to prevent that. She'd gotten used to his not touching her like this where others could see—not that anyone was paying any attention to them tucked away in the corner, given the afternoon's entertainment. “Shh.”He stroked her slowly, as if to soothe a beloved pet, enjoying the contrast between the cool jet beads and her warm flesh.
“You slicken up right quick, I'll give you that,” Sir Edmund told Iris. “But as for size, well, there's really only one proper gauge for that.”
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