by Eden Myles
Wolf stood up. He watched me greedily—wolfishly—licking the juices of my release off his lips and chin. “I should like to take you from behind now,” he said, his voice soft but metallic, and one of the hardest and most unforgiving sounds I’d ever heard. “Make yourself available to me.”
Oh God, I thought. I can’t do this now…
“Now, Rachaela. I won’t tell you twice.”
I skittered down to the floor, barely able to stand. I turned so I was facing the mirrors, facing the woman with the long mussed hair, the pale, milk chocolate skin and wild, dark, flickering eyes. She didn’t look like me. She looked like some ravished model from a porn film.
Wolf was very aggressive, as I expected he would be. He grabbed my hips and pushed my upper body forward while his hands ran up the backs of my legs, over my bare ass, and pushed the skirt of the dress up to my waist. He leaned against my back, pinning me to the surface of the vanity. I heard the sound of him undoing his zipper, the rip of foil on a condom. I waited, breathing hoarsely, as his voice came soft and hot on the back of my neck. “I will never harm you, Rachaela. I will never cause you more pain than you can endure. Do you believe me? Do you trust me?”
I breathed in and out, in and out. Only the pressure of Wolf’s body kept me upright. I felt the pressure of his cock probing me, exploring me. He felt big. Bigger than Jerrel. I whimpered deep in my throat.
“Rachaela, do you understand me?”
“Y-yes.”
He rubbed his cock up and down the slickness of my slit, rubbed against me like some large, aroused animal. The head of him parted my folds. He said words then, but not in English. Little words, little assurances, in a low, rumbling voice. I realized he was calming me like I was some poor, skittish horse. “My Rachaela,” he said, “my lovely, my pet, take my cock.” And then he drove himself into me.
I immediately came with a cry. I’d thought he was big, but I’d no idea of the size or pain of him. My body immediately rebelled at the invasion and I tried to move, to scramble away. I scratched at the vanity top in my need to escape, but he reached under me and grabbed my breasts, crushing them in his hands as he battered into me, making me take all of him at once. I wanted to scream in outrage and defiance. I wanted to move. I wanted not to move. Wolf reached around and cupped my mouth with one hand. He slid his fingers into my mouth and said, “Bite.”
I bit.
He started thrusting in and out of me in long, punishing waves so powerful that my whole body tried to convulse around him. He pounded into me, each impact stretching me, forcing me to acclimate to his size. His English turned to German, then to Afrikaans, then English again, and I realized he was calming me, telling me things to comfort me, but also training me.
“Take me, my pet, mein liebeling, my sweet, take me deep, take my cock. Let me ride that sweet ass of yours...”
I whimpered and finally relaxed into his thrusts. It hurt less when I let go, when I let him take me, when I stopped fighting him tooth and nail. I watched him rut with me in the mirrors in front of me. He went deep into me, long, course motions that almost went to the end of me. His eyes were a narrow, fiery grey, his face lean and carven and somehow beautifully cruel. I thought how Jerrel had always looked a little goofy when he’d make love to me. Wolf didn’t look goofy. He looked like some cruel, despotic archangel. He moved, and I started moving with him instead of against him. Wolf groaned with satisfaction against the back of my neck. “Ah, my pet, my little courtesan…so quickly you learn.”
He thrust inside me one last time, shuddered, and came. He closed his eyes and groaned as he emptied himself inside me. When he was done, he pulled out of me. He settled on the edge of the vanity and took me in his arms and kissed my face and chin and lips, soft, ticklish kisses that left me gasping and whimpering against him. I kissed him back, sliding my hands under his suit jacket and reveling in the hard, solid muscles of his chest. I opened my mouth to the wet slip of his tongue. He kept murmuring words against my mouth, sweet words in other languages I didn’t know.
I wanted this to go on forever, this sweetness. I didn’t care if anyone discovered us, shuddering and disheveled and covered in sweat and passion, but Wolf pulled away and stood up, taking my hand. “That’s enough training for tonight, my courtesan. I have a crème brulee planned for dessert, and then we must attend to Jasmine. I have plans for her too. Come along.”
***
BOOK 2: BIG, BAD WOLF
“What’s the matter, Rachaela? Are you afraid of the big, bad wolf?” Devon asked, holding a glittering, Venetian-style mask in front of his face. It took me a moment to realize this mask was different from the other masks that most of the guests wore—owls and ibises and cats. This was one was an elaborate, bejeweled wolf mask.
“Not funny,” I told him. “Did Malcolm put you up to that?”
Devon lowered the mask, looking surly but still delicious. He was the only male model I knew who never looked less than absolutely perfect, no matter his expression, like someone had manufactured him just so. “Aww, you’re supposed to be having a good time, doll,” he said.
I took a deep breath and glanced around the elaborately decorated ballroom of Malcolm’s Southampton estate house. About a hundred people swarmed the floor, dressed in their Revolutionary French finest and dancing the Minuet step. It was getting late, and most of the masks had started coming off. I recognized a fair amount of moneyed New Yorkers. I hoped that meant that Malcolm’s masked ball had been a success. He threw one every year at Halloween in order to benefit the local women’s shelters. But who was I kidding? Malcolm’s balls were never unsuccessful. Too many people knew and liked Malcolm too well. “It’s a lovely party,” I told Malcolm’s partner. I clutched my glass of champagne tightly, terrified I would upend it onto my saffron ball gown. “You boys always do an excellent job.”
Devon smiled wryly, took my free hand, tucked it into the crook of his arm, and walked me through the French doors and out onto the tiled parapet. Down below, I could hear the sea washing in over the rocks at high tide. I could smell the bitterly sweet Atlantic. “Then why do you look like you want to run away and hide? He hasn’t mistreated you, has he?”
“No,” I answered. “It’s not that.”
Devon stopped and looked down at my bare, shivering shoulders. I wished my ball gown wasn’t cut the way it was, leaving a scoop of bare flesh from one shoulder to the other. I don’t really know what had possessed me to wear it in the first place. I should have sent it back to where it came from. Or burned it. Devon blinked and said, “Are those real Namibian diamonds sewn into the bodice?”
“You can tell?”
“Namibian diamonds are champagne in color.”
Devon would know something like that.
“They’re real,” came a low, somewhat gravelly voice behind Devon. I looked up, and the man I’d been dreading to see tonight stepped out onto the parapet. He wore Regency wear, a black tailcoat, white waistcoat, and a red cravat with a pin in it that bore what I thought might be another Namibian diamond. He carried his walking stick, and he wore his clothes like he’d been born into them—in 1795. I had forgotten how tall and rangy Wolf was. The black made him look taller still, and it washed the little color out of his face and hair so he almost looked like a vintage sepia photograph come to life.
Devon patted my arm reassuringly, then went fearlessly up to Wolfgang Beck and shook his big hand. He had to look up at the man, and Devon wasn’t short. “Well, you’ve been MIA from the Dollhouse,” he reprimanded Wolf with a mischievous smile. “What have you been doing with your lovely self of late, Wolfie?”
Wolfie?
Wolf offered Devon a closed smile. “Ah, a little of this and a little of that.”
“Do a little of this and a little of that have a name?” Devon joked.
Wolf looked beyond Devon and pinned me with his pale, silvery gaze. He turned his head just a little and I noticed that a wide black ribbon held his heavy hank of blond hair
in check. “I’ve been terribly sensible, I’m afraid, my friend. Spent the last three months working on the seed villages along the Central Plateau.”
“Admirable. Though you know what they say about all work and no play. It makes for a boring Wolfie.”
Wolf smirked. “I promise there will be much play tonight.” Again he looked my way.
Devon must have picked up on Wolf’s cue, because he offered his mask to Wolf, excused himself, and closed the French doors behind him, leaving me on the parapet with my partner. My lover. My gentleman.
The word gentleman had never really meant much to me until now, until I’d discovered the Society. Or rather, the Society had discovered me. I’d never known what the title was capable of until recently.
“Rachaela,” Wolf said, very formerly. His voice was a low rumble, his eyes narrow and intense. He rolled my name along in that way only a foreigner could do. He held the wolf mask in one hand, his cane in the other. “I’ve missed you.”
I threw my drink in his face.
Wolf and I had been good friends and even better partners in the company up until that night in the restaurant—that night he had invited me to “audition” his potential courtesan, Jasmine. It had started out innocently enough, but we had wound up attacking each other like a couple of sex-starved animals in the ladies’ room. Now I thought about it constantly. It had been, admittedly, the best sex I’d ever had, but then Wolf had laid his ridiculous claims on me. He had insisted that I, too, was his courtesan, that I was to follow his “rules,” that I was somehow in competition with Jasmine.
I had dreaded the following day, afraid Wolf would come to work, flaunting his victory—or, at the very least, teasing me about it in private. But that morning I received an email from him telling me he had to fly back to Namibia, his homeland, that he was in danger of losing some of the lands he had planned to develop to an investor who wanted to mine the Namib desert for diamonds. I knew Wolf took his developments very seriously. It had taken three months for him to secure his holdings on the land. During that time, he hadn’t written, hadn’t called. Nothing for three fucking months. And then, just yesterday, the dress had come, as well as an invitation to Malcolm’s masked ball. Wolf had included instructions. I had worn the dress because it was all I could find on short notice, and the masked ball was for a worthy charity, after all, so I had attended, but I had thrown the instructions out.
Wolf believed he could do as he pleased, that throwing a bit of money and power about was all it took to fix things.
Slowly, he withdrew the handkerchief he kept up his sleeve like some kind of Eighteenth Century nobleman and wiped the champagne off his cheeks. He dabbed at his cravat. “I deserve that. It’s bad etiquette for a gentleman to leave his courtesan without a formal goodbye.”
“Fuck you,” I said evenly. I wanted to throw more than a glass of champagne at him. I wanted to throw the entire fucking bottle. “How dare you up and leave the company like that? How fucking dare you?”
He looked at me somewhat critically. “I have other interests, you know, pet. I own five different corporations. And it’s not like you cannot run the magazine on your own. You’re done so quite well for the past ten years.”
“That’s not the point.”
“What is the point?”
I glared at him. “I’m not some floozy you picked up, Wolf. I’m your corporate partner. I deserve a little more respect than that, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” he answered. He sounded a little sad. Regretful? I doubted it. “Which is why I chose to leave you in peace so you might attend to your current affairs without interruption. Your very messy divorce. Your daughter, who needs you. How is your daughter?”
Wolf’s voice was low, concerned, much too personal for my liking. I said, “Asia is Asia. We’re both getting used to things. It hasn’t been easy, but it never is.”
“Yes, I see.” He looked away towards the ocean, the wolf mask still in his hand. I felt the mood shift slightly. He smirked a little. He didn’t smile, only smirked. I’d never understood why until I’d kissed him that night for the first time. Wolf had very good, very strong teeth, but his canines were a little too long and a little too sharp—noticeably so when he grinned, which I had seen only once. What big teeth you have, Grandma. It didn’t surprise me that he was so reluctant to smile. I had a fantasy of Wolf as a teenager being teased relentlessly over his teeth. “Is the dress satisfactory?”
“I can buy my own dresses, Wolf.”
“I wanted to spoil my courtesan,” he said as he looked at me again in that way he had, as if he’d very much like to rip my clothes off me. He moved a few steps closer to me. “Let me. It is a gentleman’s prerogative to do so.” His voice was a little harder than usual, telling me this was less a request and more a command. He put a hand on the railing I was leaning against. He stood over me, looking down. The gesture was both protective as well as a little possessive, like the way male lions and leopards rest their heads atop their mates. “Though perhaps I should not have. You’ve forgotten your etiquette in my absence, Rachaela. We are off the clock and you’ve failed to address me as ‘sir’ five times.”
Oh God, not more of his courtesan nonsense. “You’re counting?”
“I have an eidetic memory. That’s six times.”
“For heaven’s sakes.”
“Seven.”
“What happens when I forget?”
Wolf smirked. “I punish you.”
I gave him a surly look. “For forgetting to address you as ‘sir’?”
“That’s correct. You’re my courtesan. I’m your gentleman. It’s my job to discipline you. You’re up to eight. Do you want to continue, Rachaela?”
I closed my mouth.
“Very wise,” he said. He reached down, palmed my cheek, and kissed me. It was a very hungry kiss. He almost seemed to sigh into my mouth. The rough burn of his blond and nearly invisible beard made my pulse jump. The citrus smell of his cologne made my head spin. His tongue probed my mouth and went halfway down my throat. He nipped at my mouth with those very sharp teeth of his. “I’ve missed you, mein liebeling,” he said low and intimately as his hand moved over the bodice of my ball gown and palmed one of my breasts. I felt a spark and my heart seemed to flit erratically inside my chest.
Sometimes, when he spoke, he sounded neither British nor Afrikaans. Sometimes he sounded like what he was—a big, blond German dispossessed from his original homeland. Were I to dress him up in furs and give him a spear, he’d have fitted in perfectly with Leif Eriksson’s men. The thought did nothing for the dull ache between my legs. As if sensing my unease, he pushed the edge of the dress down until my breasts were revealed. I was small enough that I didn’t really need a bra, and the cut of the dress didn’t allow for it anyway. The coolness of the salty coastal winds made me shiver and made my nipples dark and hard. He saw and dipped his head, the top of his blond head just brushing my chin as he seized a nipple in his teeth. He put a hand in my back to steady me. He worked my nipple hard, all the way to the edge of pain, until the breath went out of me and I groaned, clutching at his shoulders. The near pain of his biting and sucking made a jagged line that ripped right through my body, from breasts to groin.
He stopped and looked around the parapet until he noticed a bench situated just behind some of Malcolm’s potted climbing roses. He took my hand and led me toward the bench. Silly me, I imagined us sitting together and listening to the sea, maybe making out like a couple of teenagers, but the moment he was sitting, he grabbed me and dragged me down across his lap. “Wolf!” I cried.
“Nine.”
“Let. Me. Go!” Oh God, not now. Not here…
“Ten.” He pushed the huge fluff of my skirts away and his hand fell across my ass, clad only in my bikini underwear. He grunted in disapproval. I had worn the dress that Wolf had sent me from Africa, but I hadn’t gone without panties, as he had instructed. I certainly never thought he’d check. “You haven’t followe
d my instructions, pet. That’s eleven, but I’m feeling merciful tonight, and I feel I owe you something for absconding, so I will let this one mistake pass—so long as it’s not repeated, of course.” He ripped the thin strip of cloth away and I sucked in a sharp breath at the sudden cold.
“I told you, Rachaela. You need to learn discipline.” His hand returned to my ass, warm and caressing. He palmed my left cheek, kneaded it for half a second, and then his hand cracked across my bare flesh. Holy fuck! I’d thought he’d been joking, one of his stupid little sex games, but the impact fucking hurt like hell and I let out my breath in a gasping, strangled little voice that barely sounded human. I tried to wriggle free. He held me down in his lap. I let out a whimper of frustration.
Wolf ignored me. He hit me again, though not exactly in the same spot, thank God.
Now I did cry out. His blow packed incredible power, pain and humiliation. I nearly jumped straight up out his arms.
He rested his hand atop my ass, rubbing at the heat he was producing. “Hush,” Wolf said, sounding annoyed. His voice grated like sheets of metal rubbing together. “I told you that you would be punished, Rachaela. And now you shall. We learn nothing from our victories. We do learn from our mistakes.”
Crack.
The third hit broke me. I screamed, long and hard, muffling it against the palm of my hand to keep the others from investigating. He held me down and let me carry on until I’d exhausted myself. He showed absolutely no reaction to my cries, and displayed no mercy despite my pleas. His hand moved over me as if he were savoring his work. There was no way I was going to get through seven more repetitions of this—these weren’t love slaps, he was fucking serious about the pain—but Wolf shushed me, petted me, talked me down in his low, disjointed African-English dialect. Then he hit me again and I cried out, biting into my lace-gloved hand. His blows fell one after another. I cried out every single time, all the way until the end. I had never been treated like this in my fucking life. No one had ever hit me, not even my parents. My mom had been from New York, but my dad had come from the Deep South, where no parent spared the rod, and still he had never hit me. I was his only child, his little girl, his princess. By the time it was over, I was lying across Wolf’s lap and sobbing like a hysterical little girl. I didn’t know what hurt more, the pain or the shame, but I decided this was the most humiliating moment of my life.
