I moaned and squirmed in my roped-off pose.
“Keep still while I beat you,” he said, and while his words were an order, his tone was bored, as if my obedience was route. “You know you deserve this, sposa in fuga.”
Runaway bride.
His Italian words reverberated off my heart like a gong, and the look of stern displeasure superseded by genuine hurt on his aristocratic face prolonged the echo.
Before I could comprehend how his regret might have changed things, his hand found my opposite thigh again in a biting slap.
Then again. Back and forth between each thigh, his palm heating the skin in rhythmic increments; the sharp initial slap, the dull burn, then again, the slap harder, the burn deeper, tunneling through my legs like new nerve endings.
I rocked into his thrusts unconsciously, tipping my hips to give him greater access to me, hoping wantonly that his hands might find my cunt.
“You are leaking all over the place,” he noted, his palm smacking damply against the evidence. “Perhaps I’m not making my point properly.”
His eyes snagged mine, his pupils blown wide so that the grey only thinly framed the wide abyss of dark want at their centers. I could read his arousal in the kick of the pulse in his throat, the way his Adam’s apple scraped against the skin when he swallowed thickly around the surge of desire cresting through his belly. The scarce evidence locked under his cold control made me pant even harder.
Then our connection broke as he angled his hand up instead of across and landed a cutting slap directly over my cunt. I almost collapsed to the ground as pain went spiraling into whorls of pleasure inside me, but Alexander’s hand on my pussy stilled me, cupping the wet flesh so intimately I could feel the slight chafe of his callous against the sensitive skin as strongly as sandpaper.
With his other hand, he pinched my chin and leaned close so that his black eyes dominated my vision. “You are going to keep completely still as I turn this pussy red and raw with my hand. I know you’ll want to come, my beauty, because you love it hard like this, but you are not to orgasm until your Master wills it. Is that understood?”
“Yes, Master,” I breathed as his fingers played at the wet entrance of my sex, dipping just inside my flesh, the three points of his fingers stretching me with their width.
I tried to grind down on them, but then they were gone, my hips twisting into empty air. My groan was loud, prompting the men I’d forgotten were watching us to laugh quietly at my obvious lust.
I thought it was probably a rare thing to see one of the slaves so blatantly enjoying the ministrations of their masters. A very small dark and forgotten corner of my psyche perked up under their regard. I was a vain woman after all, and I’d always loved male attention, even when it was tainted with avaricious lust. Maybe even especially then. The exhibition was strangely tantalizing, not because I felt the men deserved to see the intimate beauty of my union with Alexander, but because a dark part of me loved to be treated like this by my Master.
Like his wanton, needy slave.
He spanked me until my pussy throbbed harder than my heart, until I keened and begged shamelessly for his cock to fill me up and take away the ache.
Then, when I couldn’t take any more, there was the thick stretch of large plastic cock burrowing into the swollen folds of my pussy. Alexander carefully pushed me down on it with a firm hand over my hip, the other holding the toy still between my legs, unmoving so that I had to be the one to fuck myself down on it. He wouldn’t take me, he told the crowd and me, unless I could prove I was worth the fucking.
So my hips churned as well as they could in the tight bindings, the lightly abrasive rope cutting over my hips the way Alexander’s punishing fingers used to, the slight chafe arrowing straight to my sex, increasing the tempo of its throb. I was panting and sweating with the effort to fuck that thick toy, whimpering slightly because it was just not enough to get me off, even with the added sensation of Alexander’s cool metallic eyes cutting into my skin like the edge of a blade. There was a wet, sucking slide that sounded clear through the room from my efforts, and it lacquered my skin with the blazing heat of a blush.
“My poor slave can’t orgasm like this,” Alexander taunted, his eyes narrowed at me in twin expressions of disappointment and derision. “You need to be filled up with more, don’t you? You want to feel me claim each one of your tight holes.”
My moan wrecked the passage of my throat, raw and rumbling. “Yes, Master.”
“Such sweet words on your filthy lips,” he praised, pinching my chin to tip my head up so he could bite, then lick at my mouth. He tasted of heat, slightly metallic and rich like the warmth after swallowing certain spices. I wanted to luxuriate in that hot cavern, moan into it as he fucked his tongue over mine, but he pulled away with one last searing suck, and my mouth went suddenly cold, tingling from the abuse.
“You need your Master between these pretty red thighs?” he asked coolly.
Yes, yes, yes, I chanted and moaned and pleaded.
He asked me again. Slapped me again just over my clit. Plucked at my nipples relentlessly until they felt like forged iron, hot and torturous on my chest.
“You want me to fuck you in front of everyone, in front of anyone I chose?” he asked as he squeezed the thick, mouth-watering length of the erection tenting his slacks.
I licked the drool from the corner of my mouth. “Yes, Master.”
“Tell me why, little mouse.”
I knew what he wanted, not just because I was a good slave, but because I’d been in love with the man. I knew he wanted more than just my body at that moment, but I rebelled against giving him the rest. I didn’t know his plan, what he would do with my capitulation and my heart if I granted them to him.
Smack.
Another slap made my pussy convulse around the girth of the toy inside me almost painfully. My clit throbbed so strongly, I was afraid I would come just like that, shattering on the sharp edge of his meanness like ceramic thrown to the floor.
I whimpered loudly as he wrenched the plastic cock from my cunt and tossed it to the floor, leaving my hips churning restlessly over the empty air.
“Tell me, wife,” he ordered darkly, stepping into my body with his thigh against my sex so that the material scraped over my raw nerves like a match to a striking board. “I’ve waited five years to hear you say it, and I won’t wait a moment longer. Give me what we both need to hear you say.”
His eyes were silver mirrors duplicating the desperation and longing I felt reflected in my own. A whine leaked from my parted lips.
“Tell me, little mouse,” he repeated, his eyes hooks drawing me into him inexorably, dragging me through his wake until I was caught up in his net.
“Because I want everyone to see that I belong to you,” I said, not a whisper or a roar, but a statement that moved through my body like a spiritual awakening.
“Yes,” Alexander hissed, unbuttoning his trousers, unzipping, and then—I gasped because I was so far gone to him—his gorgeous, weeping cock. “You belong to me.”
And then he stepped up with his cock grasped almost violently in his fist, the other hand clamping down over my hip, and he surged inside me in one long, searing thrust.
I screamed at the ceiling as my head threw back and my pussy detonated in an orgasm so strong, I saw stars dance against the top of the club. He fucked me hard, pounding into my spanked and swollen cunt proprietarily, uncaring of my pleasure in his entitled quest for his own climax. It only proved to send me higher, and when he sank his teeth into my neck, holding me there as he fucked me like an animal breeding its mate, I came again, screaming my throat raw as he claimed me.
When he came moments later, it was with a roar, the beast at the heart of him exposed for me to see and feel against me. I loved the thrill of it, of fucking a man so much like a dangerous animal, of being bound up by his orders and tied down to his mercy.
My mind was lost to the plush, velvety texture of quiet tha
t followed a spectacular orgasm, but I was distantly aware of Alexander pulling out, his semen and my wetness leaking obscenely down my thigh. Then he did as he’d once done after fucking me in the poppy field at Pearl Hall, he smeared our combined juices into my achy, distended cunt all the way back over my asshole and up onto the bare skin of my pubis. I gasped as he smoothed the last of the dampness against my lips and then swooped in to kiss it brutally off my mouth.
He turned to the audience after tucking his wet, half-hard length back into his trousers, his eyebrow cocked and arms crossed as he idly demanded, “Well?”
A man stood up, adjusted his erection in his suit pants, and said, “There are still more pairings to exhibit…”
Alexander condescended to giving the man one of his patented arch looks.
“But, well, yes, you both were incredible, Mr. Davenport. We’d be happy to include her with the girls used at the club for special occasions. She heeds your direction beautifully.”
“The only one who touches my slave’s sweet mouth and tender cunt is me. Next time you inquire, I’ll cut your bollocks off, is that clear?”
The judge shot a look at the rest of the panel but nodded. It was clear they had no idea who Xan really was, that this New York branch hadn’t heard of the legends of the unconquerable Earl.
“Oh, and please,” Xan said, smiling his predatory smile. “Call me Lord Thornton.”
We didn’t leave right away. We weren’t allowed, and while Alexander was the kind of man who only listened to demands when they suited him, he relented and tucked us both into the dark recesses of a corner table to watch the remaining “performances.” He had cut me out of the ropes, washed away my sweat and grime with a warm, damp cloth in one of the back rooms, and wrapped me in his huge dress shirt so that I didn’t have to stay in the minuscule lingerie set I’d arrived in. I belted it at my waist and laughed at the way it covered a decent portion of my legs and drooped over my hands.
Alexander had watched me laugh, then tucked a lock of hair behind my ear before ushering us back out into the club.
Now, I sat on his lap as many of the other slaves were doing, but I had his shirt covering my body and a blanket a server had unearthed from somewhere that smelled of oak barrels keeping me warm. Alexander cradled me; there was no other word for it. He tucked me into the crease of his body and his right arm, my cheek propped on the bulge of his pectoral, my legs curled up against his chest. I could feel his strong, steady heartbeat against my cheek, and the hard planes of his muscled body bracketing me like armor.
It was an illusion dreamed up in my lingering subspace, but I thought I might never have felt so safe.
We didn’t speak, and I didn’t attempt to. It wasn’t the time or place, and I was desensitized to Alexander’s long, heavy silences even after all these years. He was content to hold me, and I was more than content to be held.
Of all the things I’d missed about being Alexander’s, I’d missed his physical affection the most. In some ways, it was more eloquent than his cultured, highly educated words ever could be.
I was drifting into a post-climax nap when Alexander turned to concrete. My eyes snapped open, instantly alert as someone slipped into the shadowy space beside us.
She was speaking before I could get a sense for who she might have been, but her words made it impossible to mistake her for someone else. “Master Alexander, I-I I am sorry to b-bother you when you are with…s-slave.”
Yana.
Her sweet Russian accent and nervous stutter only highlighted her delicate, almost fragile beauty, like a flower that would be too soon out of bloom. It shocked me how young she appeared given that she had been Noel’s slave almost three decades go. There were scars highlighted on her skin in the blue light of the club, and fear worn tightly in the skin around her eyes, but otherwise, her slight build and ethereal beauty made her seem no less than twenty-five. It was no wonder she was popular with the men of the Order. She looked built to be broken, a clay pigeon constructed just to be shot open.
“Don’t worry yourself, Yana, I asked you to meet me here.”
I looked up sharply at him, jealousy so acute in my chest it felt like a poison dart punctured right through my heart. He placated me with a hand smoothed down my hair, wrapping familiarly in the strands.
When I looked back at Yana, her huge almost translucent blue eyes were trained on his fingers in my hair as if she was witnessing a miracle enacted by God.
I supposed affection from a Master was exactly that to a woman so inured to the cruelty of slavery.
“I-I am happy to s-see you, Master, b-but I do not know what you w-w-would want from me,” she admitted in a timid voice, her eyes trained on Alexander’s neck and never straying higher out of engrained respect for his superiority over her.
I wondered if she even knew how deeply grey and enchanting his eyes could be.
“You are slave to Master di Carlo now, aren’t you, Yana?” Alexander asked.
I stiffened at the name of the Cosa Nostra’s crime family boss. He was part of the Order?
“But he’s an Italian-American?” I accused without filtering myself.
“The American faction of the Order works a little less discriminatingly than its British counterpoint. There are no titles here, only wealth and power. Di Carlo is enough of both now that he warranted an invitation, and as part of his initiation, he was gifted his first slave.” He tipped his head to Yana.
I blinked hard, my mind scrambling to make sense of the pathway of connections. It felt like a significant reveal, but I couldn’t fathom how di Carlo being part of the Order was exactly momentous.
“What the American Council didn’t understand,” Alexander continued as he eyed Yana’s bruised, frail form with hard eyes. “Was that a man built on wealth is not necessarily one of old loyalty or integrity. That a man like that could be bought.”
“By who? You?” I asked and watched as Yana flinched at my audacity.
“Perhaps,” he said, sipping his scotch. “Or perhaps by another. Yana, maybe you can shed some light on the matter?”
She licked her lips, quick and nervous, then did it again. Her entire body seemed filled with quick, brittle energy as if she would break and do so willingly at any provocation. Pity bloomed in my chest, overtaking my previous jealousy.
Alexander might have taken a beating for her as a boy, but he hadn’t been old enough or caring enough to save her completely.
Not the way it seemed he had once tried and might attempt again to do for me.
“H-he was sponsored by a man,” she admitted, eyes rolling around the club like loose marbles, searching for someone who might spot her betraying her new Master. “He and his n-nephew. He wanted badly to be in Order, b-but he waited very long time. H-he had to d-do something f-f-first for this man.”
She swallowed hard and leaned forward to look right into my eyes, her own filled with almost savage apology.
“H-he had to k-know you and r-report on you,” she admitted.
Alexander turned to stone beneath me, so it felt I was entombed in concrete.
“By who?” I whispered, so afraid of the answer I barely dared to ask the question.
Yana shuddered violently, then finally, her fear of the name she spoke more than the fear of Alexander, she lifted her eyes to his and said, “Master Noel.”
Cosima
“She didn’t know anything more,” I told Alexander, trying to calm the barely leashed fury that threatened to overtake him as he sat beside me in the Town Car, furiously texting someone.
Yana had disappeared almost immediately after her confession when the council had finally concluded The Trials and announced Alexander and me as the winners. She hadn’t wanted to be punished for being outside her Master’s orders, and I couldn’t blame her for it. In fact, I was sure if it wasn’t for Alexander taking that whipping for her as a boy, she wouldn’t have ever dreamt of slipping out of di Carlo’s house in the first place.
The
last thing she had said of any consequence was that di Carlo would be sitting a card game in Little Italy at an underground casino the next night, and only then, after Alexander used his Dominant voice on her.
It wasn’t much to go off, but it was enough to leave me reeling.
Noel had been keeping an eye on me through a spy for years through the Cosa Nostra family, and it made me sick to my stomach to think of all the information he might have gleaned.
“She knows more,” Alexander bit out, the harsh lines of his face made steeper by the bright light of his phone screen as he glared down at a message. “If not, she could if only she wanted to.”
“She risked her safety by meeting you there. You should have asked her to meet you more discreetly,” I chastised him.
His eyes swept from the phone to where I sat beside him, pinning me in place so forcibly I couldn’t even draw breath. “There isn’t much more discretion for a slave wearing an unlockable collar and shackles around her wrists and ankles than Club Bacchus. No one notices slaves there, no one will have noticed one more, especially one as meek and well trained as Yana. It was safe as I could make it and necessary too.”
“It was risky, probably for both of you,” I countered, turning to find solace in the streets passing like blurred, dark watercolours passing out the window.
His scoff was haughty, so condescending I didn’t have to see his face to know how his brows would be raised, his mouth puckered like an exclamation mark punctuating my stupidity. “I shuddered to think how you may react if you knew just how many ‘risks’ I’ve taken over the past four years to see you safe.”
I swallowed the thick swell of longing in my throat and nearly choked on the impossible obstruction. Alexander’s hand collected the spill of hair down my back and wrapped it unerringly around his palm until my head was forced to turn his way to lessen the tension and my mouth parted on a slightly gasp of pain. He was waiting for me, his eyes glittering like the sheen of a knife’s edge as they cut into the heart of me.
“There is no one I wouldn’t kill for you. No crime I wouldn’t commit or atrocity I wouldn’t instigate if it meant keeping you safe and keeping you mine.”
Enamoured Page 18
