by Nia Farrell
“If I agree, what shall we stake?” I asked him, at once nervous and excited. The thrill of engaging him, the possibility of winning, the thought of losing…and what he would demand of me....
My pantaloons were decidedly wet. I pressed my thighs together, hoping to stem the tide, at least until we were back in our room. I had needed his help to get into my dress. He’d have to help me get out of it as well. I yet hoped to turn it to my advantage, but I needed to keep him like this—amenable, and open to the possibilities.
One side of his mouth curled into a smile. “To be determined,” he said. “The closer that one of our guesses is to the final count, the larger the reward should be, don’t you think? What say you? Will you play with me, sister dear?”
The gleam in his eyes was anything but fraternal. Add the line he’d just drawn, and I was lost.
“Sixty percent,” I told him. The certainty in my voice was less for the margin I’d given and more for what was going to happen when we got back to the hotel. His whole demeanor had shifted, like a satyr revealing his true nature to a mortal woman he intended to ravish at his leisure.
He smiled, a god among men. “Fifty-one. Now let us finish, please.”
I managed to comport myself and did justice to my dessert, eating slowly enough to savor the fruit-filled pastry. Edward ordered baked Alaska and was kind enough to share with me. I kept my gaze on his as he brought a bite-sized piece to my parted lips and fed it to me. I closed my mouth, and my eyes, lost in an orgy of sensation—the taste and texture of meringue and cake and the delicious chill of ice cream.
I opened my eyes to find Edward watching me with undisguised hunger.
“You’re easily engaged,” I said, wondering if he had a fetish and feeding me had assuaged it. “No matter. If you shoveled that dessert in me until I burst, I’d die happy. Holy mother of pearl, that’s sinful. Have you had it before?”
Edward snorted a laugh. The tension between us eased, his mood shifting from blatant sensuality to easy camaraderie more quickly than I could blink. He shook his golden head. “No. This is a first.”
Dining out with him was treat enough. That he’d chosen to share his special dessert with me sent a tide of sentimental warmth to the harbor my heart. “Thank you.” I forced a smile and pushed the words through the tangle of emotions that had narrowed the channel of my throat. “For this. For—well, for everything.”
Or nearly everything. I dreaded to think of the spanking that he’d promised, earned when I had teased him on the train.
He shrugged and waved it off, as if it were nothing.
“You saved me,” I reminded him. “I shudder to think what would have happened, if you had not come when you did.”
He swallowed his bite of dessert before answering. “O’Flaherty would not have let them take you.”
“Or he might have sent me off with good riddance, once he learned what I had done.” I waggled my spoon at him like a governess illustrating the point of a morality tale to her charge. “I cannot help but feel guilty, keeping him uninformed. Having him pack my things and bring them, uprooting his life when I’m not certain that he will want to be a part of mine—it seems…I don’t know. Deceitful, I suppose. Not that I wasn’t entirely truthful before, but at least it was an honest deception.”
My assertion that I could be at once forthright and misleading made Edward shake his head in wonder. “Semantics,” he said, and fed me another bite of his decadent dessert. “He has made no commitment beyond the task that he agreed to perform. Rest assured, I shall make the trip worth his while. If he chooses not to stay, I will settle enough on him, he can go wherever he wants. But if he stays, he must be willing to accept you for who you are, and forgive that you ever led him to believe otherwise.”
But what if he didn’t? What if he couldn’t? What if my sins against him proved too great and he was forever lost to me?
I blinked back the sting of tears and nodded. “I suppose. It’s just….” I shook my head and exhaled shakily. “Please. Stop. I don’t want to cry.”
“Of course you do.” He murmured intimately, a dark promise in his voice and in his eyes. “Perhaps not here. Not now. This is no place for the raw honesty that I shall demand of you. But you need to cry, Elena.”
Elena. He’d called me by my name. He’d said he wanted my tears. Wanted me to beg him to stop. To beg him to go on. Did this mean—?
“Yes,” he said, catching my gaze and holding it, stripping me bare and refusing to let me hide. “Yes, you need to cry. I want you to cry. But as much as I covet your tears, I will not wrest them from you. They must be freely given. You have what it takes to allow it. The courage to yield yourself to me. The strength to submit to my authority—a submission that you alone can give. That you, my dear, must give. I will not touch you otherwise.”
“Edward…”
“Stop,” he ordered, reaching across the table and capturing my hand. “Stop. Thinking.” His thumb rubbed circles on the inside of my wrist. “Breathe. Yes. Breathe. Trust me to know your limits. To never give more than you can take. To always give you what you need.”
“I do,” I whispered. “I do. It’s just…”
“Elena, you must decide what you want. To live in the shadow of fear, shackled by doubt, is a cold and lonely place to be. I know. I have been there. I have done that. I once refused to take a risk, and I still have regrets. You must find a way to quiet your doubts and move past your fears. Mine can be the voice and the hands that guide you, if you will let them, hmm?”
There was an intensity to his gaze that burned like a brand, ready to sear his mark upon my soul. What we’d done so far…well, it was educational, to be certain. But he had done nothing to actually make me a fallen woman. Any doctor who examined me could attest to that. He’d said he wished for me to remain a virgin, but tonight there had been a palpable shift in the energy between us. He wanted me. Of that much I was certain. Our intimate joining was no longer a matter of if but when. The thing was, I sensed he had the damned patience of Job. Molding me into a perfect submissive might take days or weeks or months, depending on how far off the mark I was from his personal paradigm. And if submission meant licking boots and crawling and eating out of a pet bowl, he had better think again.
Except for the crawling. That, I think I could do.
“No abject humiliation,” I told him. “No sharing, and no infidelity. Once you’ve claimed me, I’ll be yours alone. I’ll expect you to reciprocate for as long as we are together.”
Edward eyed me carefully. “I had a hard time sharing toys as a child. There will be no one else in our bed, unless you wish it.”
Color bloomed in my cheeks. “I do not. I will not.”
“Never say never. Eventually you may want to expand your horizons. Broaden your experience. Feel what it is like to have two men inside you. Or three. You may find yourself curious how a woman pleases another. Experimenting, exploring one’s sexuality…it is natural, despite what society would have you believe. If it were up to them, you would be locked away until marriage. I only want to set you free.”
“By submitting.”
“Yes. As strange as it may sound. Submission means allowing me to make choices and decisions that are ultimately in your best interest. Giving me that power allows you to simply be, in the moment. To experience. To feel. To respond. To enjoy to the point of satiation. Complete and utter satiation. You would like that, would you not?”
Holy mother of pearl. “Yes, Sir. Please, Sir.”
The heat was back to incendiary level. “Good girl.”
Chapter Fourteen
“Lesson Three,” he said, adding his waistcoat to the frockcoat draped on the back of a chair. “Taking discipline.”
Discipline? I curled my hands to still their trembling. I knew enough of the good professor that a lesson learned garnered a reward. If I needed to experience his discipline, then that’s what I would do.
He took the diamond stick pin from his crav
at and laid it on the table. “Clothes off, Elena. Now.”
Edward was as beautiful as a Sandro Botticelli angel, but no matter the perfection of his countenance, the gleam in his eye was more sinner than saint.
“Um. Could you help me, please?” Turning around, I presented my back to him and stood silent, with my head bowed, humbled in my need. From across the way, I heard the slither of cloth as he untied his cravat and slid it from his neck.
Heel taps marked his passage. He stopped behind me and stepped into my sphere, his legs pushing against my hooped skirts, bringing his hands close enough to work. His breath was sweet and warm against expanse of skin exposed by my evening dress. Had it been daytime, I’d have been buttoned to the neck.
He applied his dexterous fingers to the task at hand, unfastening my hooks until my bodice parted company with my corseted breasts. He inhaled, deeply enough that he could smell my arousal. My secrets held no great mystery. His slow exhalation raised gooseflesh on the exposed skin of my back. When the last hook was undone, he slid his hands inside my dress, took hold of my waist, drew me against him, and fastened his mouth on the back of my neck, biting it like a stallion and I was a mare in season.
Electricity shot through me, lighting nerve endings that sent currents from my breasts to my core, and from my core to the cove of my femininity, drawn like a rod to charge my aching point of need. He let me feel his arousal. Teased me with it. Made me hunger to have it inside me.
“Off,” he ordered and I obeyed, forcing myself to have greater care when I wanted to tear things away and toss them asunder. I draped my dress on the back of the other chair. My hoops and petticoats went into a pile by my trunk. I sat on it to remove my shoes and stockings, took off my corset cover, and dropped my drawers, leaving only my corset, worn over my chemise.
“The rest,” he said. “Then put your corset back on.”
I did as he wished, giving him an eyeful of naked flesh before I covered parts of it back up. Having my breasts plumped and my bottom bare was a curious feeling. A sudden, irrational embarrassment took hold. My cheeks flooded with color like the untried school girl I’d been at fourteen, experiencing my first awareness of men. My mother must have noticed. She’d visited my bedroom and lectured me on the importance of remaining pure, warning me of various ways a boy might try to corrupt me, while my face grew red as a beet.
“Hmm.” Edward’s voice was like the tongue of a large cat, at once rough and tender, its timbre stroking my senses as surely as if he’d laid fingers on my flesh. He undid the top button of his crisp white shirt, unfastened his cuffs, and rolled up his sleeves, exposing the hair-dusted strength of his forearms. His pants were still on, of course, as were his braces, which I’d always found oddly erotic in a grab-and-hold-on kind of way.
Perhaps he wasn’t the only one with a fetish.
I realized I’d given myself away with the hint of a smile when he rumbled, “Such a busy mind. Such an expressive mouth.” He opened the front of his pants and pulled out his cock, which he’d managed to control despite my display. “Let’s see how well you remember Lesson One. Kneel.”
I folded my legs and dropped to the floor.
“Clasp your hands behind you.”
It was a simple request with interesting results. Pulling my shoulders back gave Edward an unobstructed view of my cleavage that threatened to spill from the top of my corset.
“Very nice,” he rumbled, taking himself in one hand and guiding his member to my mouth. “Now…open wide.”
He pushed the velvet crown past my lips while I teased him with my tongue, making certain to keep my teeth away from his sensitive flesh. His thumb and forefinger circling the base provided a stopgap for his forays, which went ever deeper. “Squeeze my stones,” he grated.
Releasing my grip, I managed to get a hand inside his opened fly, found the fleshy orbs, and tightened my fingers, not ungently, having paid enough attention to know that he liked some pain—or at least the edge of it.
I twisted his testicles. He growled at me, snapped his hips, and drove himself into my throat, stopping only at the hilt of his fingers. I was as pleased as Edward when I managed to control my gag reflex and not throw up on him. I squeezed harder, then pressed on his taint and slid my finger along it, until I was testing the ruched ring that he’d had me breach before.
Breath hissed above my head. He abandoned the hold he had at the base of his erection and thrust ten fingers in my hair. His grip firm, clasping my head to control me, he started to use my face in earnest. Forging deep into my throat, he held himself there, relishing the feel, pulling back only long enough to let me catch my breath before thrusting in again. As he pistoned his hips, a tension took hold. I pushed the tip of my finger into his opening and felt his manhood swell, impossibly larger. His breath grew ragged, his rhythm erratic. “Get ready,” he warned, a second before he ejaculated, filling my mouth with spurts of salty, tangy cream. I swallowed, fast and furious, teasing every bit out of him with my tongue, then lapping the last from the tip before settling back on my heels, my hands once more obediently clasped behind me.
He tucked himself back inside but left the front of his pants opened. “Where’s the rope?” He sounded as civil as if he wanted biscuits with his tea, but there was a sharpness in his gaze that made me shiver.
“In my trunk,” I told him.
“Go fetch.”
“No!” he said sharply when I started to rise. “Crawl. You may use your hands to open the lid and take out the rope, but you will carry it to the bed in your mouth and hold it there until I say otherwise. Nod your head if you understand.”
I understood, all right. He was silencing me. Making me crawl. Teaching me submission. I could refuse, of course, but crying off at this point would ruin every hope for whatever future the two of us might otherwise have. He’d said that if I did not submit, he would not touch me. I could see that actually happening. Despite however much he might be tempted, or how sorely tested was his control, he’d finish himself off first and leave me writhing in agony until I could manage to do the same.
I supposed that “practice makes perfect” applied to the erotic arts as well.
I crawled to the trunk, extracted the rope, caught it between my teeth, and made it to the bed before the first drool escaped the corner of my mouth. It tracked down my chin and dripped onto the rope, I think. Perhaps the floor. Not that it mattered. Edward cared only that I was compliant, unceasingly and unquestioningly obedient to his wishes for the duration of the time that he made me kneel. If the taste of jute was so deeply ingrained, I’d not be soon rid of it, it was a small price to pay for pleasing him.
“Good girl,” he said at last, when I was nearly dehydrated from all the spittle gone south. He took hold of the coils. “Open.”
My jaw ached with the effort, but I yielded the rope and waited for whatever came next.
Edward hefted the rope, weighing his choices. “Later,” he said, rather wistfully. He tossed it aside and sat on the bed. “Time for your discipline. Long overdue, from that tease on the train.” He patted a thigh. “Here, if you please. Head to my left, that lovely bare arse of yours to my right. Yes, that’s it. Perfect.”
I bracketed his body, my forearms denting the mattress on one side of his lap, my one knee barely on the bed, the way I was angled across his thighs. He traced the bottom edge of my corset with his finger, then ran it down my spine and into my crevice, dipping into my honey pot. “Just checking,” he murmured. “Let’s see how wet you are when we’re done. How old are you?”
“Twenty-four, Sir.”
“That will do for a start. You understand that this is for your own good. You’ve been living a lie.” The first blow fell, striking my buttocks with a resounding thwack that hurt like the devil. “Deceived a man who considers you a friend.” Another smack, this one on the other cheek. “Deceived me when I arrived.” He struck again, harder yet. “Flirted with me. Teased me. You have deliberately tempted me, despite m
y warnings.”
He recited a litany of misdeeds, each one punctuated with a punishing blow to my bottom. I bit my lip to keep from crying out but could do nothing to stop the tears that sprang from my eyes like a fountain.
I took note, of course, of the things that had bothered him. Knowing what affected him was empowerment, weapons in my scant but growing arsenal. Eyeing him like candy. Smelling like sin. The list went on and on, until the twenty-fourth blow fell onto my tortured flesh.
There should have been nothing erotic or sexual about it, but by the time he finished, my breasts were tight with arousal, and there was a telling wetness between my thighs.
“What do you say?” he rumbled, splaying his hand on my lower back.
“Thank you, Sir.” It was just a guess, of course. I really didn’t know what he was looking for.
“No apology?” He scraped his fingernails over my heated nether cheeks, a sensation that was at once excruciating and arousing.
“I’m sorry, Sir,” I bleated, willing to say whatever he wanted.
“Do you want me to stop?”
“Please, oh please.”
Smack.
“That is not your word, pet. Have you forgotten so soon?”
“No, please! I’ve not forgotten. It’s Delphi.”
“Do you need to use it?”
Did I? “No, I don’t think so.”
Smack.
“For God’s sake! Have mercy!” I begged him. Pleaded with him. He continued, but now he interspersed his swats with massages, rubs, and intimate caresses that made heat pool in my loins. My genitals swelled. My secrets flowed. I wept, and I moaned, and I whimpered, rising up to meet his blows, silently begging him for more.
He was right. I’d needed this…catharsis. We needed it, to set things right between us, settle accounts, and move forward with a clean slate. “More,” I grated against the sheets. “Please, Edward. Please. I need…I need….”
