She sighed out a little huff of breath, sounding more like herself. “I don’t think that’s exactly true.”
He just raised an eyebrow in reminder, gratified when she blushed—a sexual blush this time, rather than from embarrassment.
“I mean, I know I didn’t have physical control, because of the, ah...”
“Collar and chains I put on you.” Something in him enjoyed pushing her to admit that, to face what she’d let him do to her and not dance around it. That same something relished the way she wriggled a bit at his words, her naked body hot through the soft blanket. If nothing else, he’d had that much of her. Testing, needing more contact in a way he didn’t care to examine, he reached under the covering to stroke her shoulder. She moved under the caress, accepting and softening with it, and the rush of relieved tension made him realize how much he’d worried that he’d lost her trust.
“Yes,” she whispered. “I get that. But I don’t understand why the rest happened.”
“I wasn’t surprised.” He rubbed her back, smoothing the graceful arc of it. “Or, rather, I suspected you had a great deal of emotion bottled up, tied up with some kind of survivor’s guilt, so I thought it might come out.” Not so hugely and spectacularly, but then his Celestina never did anything by halves.
“Oh.” She frowned, a faint knitting of her brows, and laid her head against his chest, saying nothing more.
“What?” he asked gently, but insistently. No way she’d stop the conversation there.
She sighed again, that whiff of impatience. With herself or with him? “I just don’t see how you can know very much about me. Particularly something like that.”
He caressed her waist, the endearing dip of it, her flesh slightly ridged where the slave belt had dug in so beautifully. “You told me some of it and you’re not so difficult to read, especially as I get to know you better and you let me in more. You’re a powerfully passionate woman and I could guess how some of what you’ve gone through would have affected you. We talked about it some yesterday, why you might crave punishment, and I suspected that once you didn’t have to be the responsible one, that might give you the permission to let it all go.”
“I guess I did that.” She sounded wry.
“Which is all right.” He waited, but she didn’t reply to that. “Arabella was your sister?”
“Yes.” She barely vocalized her answer, the affirmation audible mainly because of the hiss of her breath.
“Arabella and Celestina.” Lovely names. A thought occurred to him. “Your twin?”
“Identical.” Though she showed no sign that she’d begun weeping again, the moisture dampened the silk of his shirt.
“I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine.” He’d longed for a sibling, those long lonely years ago. A brother to throw a ball with. A little sister to take care of or a big sister to tease. Anyone at all, really. “You were close then?”
“Like two halves of one whole. When...when she died, it took me a long time to believe I hadn’t died also.”
“Maybe you felt like you did.”
“Yes.” Then she was quiet so long he nearly prodded her again, but she took a breath and spoke quietly. “I think I have been dead, in a way. Going through the motions. Not feeling much of anything. That’s why I let the money thing get so bad, did nothing about my dissolving career.”
“And now?”
“I don’t know. It’s hard to know much of anything at the moment, to think very clearly.”
“Then don’t think, just feel. We can talk it out, as you’re ready.”
“I thought this was about sex, not therapy.”
“They’re not so different. Good sex should liberate us, allow us to vent our emotions, let the healing in.”
“Well, I’m sure this hardly counted as good sex for you.”
“Don’t say that.” He felt a stirring of his own impatience. “I wouldn’t be anywhere else.”
“Yes, but you hardly got to use any of those whips on me and no sex at all, so you didn’t get what you paid for and—”
She squeaked when he flipped her over, pressing her onto her back and holding her down. He’d moved out of annoyance with her, that she’d bring up money at that moment, but when her tearstained face shifted with surprise, desire edging out the dredges of grief in her eyes, it seemed to be the right move. Deliberately, watching her closely, he tugged at the blanket between them, pulling it away and then running his hand down the length of her lushly naked body.
“First, all of this is sex. Second, we’re not done yet, are we?”
“We—we’re not?” She stammered on the question when he found her wrists and pinned them over her head.
“I haven’t heard your safeword, which means you still belong to me. Mine to do with as I wish to for the rest of the night.” He stared her down, enjoying how she struggled a little, biting her lip in consternation. Grief swiftly fading. “Unless you have something to say?”
Chapter Nineteen
Her fragmented thoughts scrambled to keep up—not really possible with the sudden awareness of her vulnerability, naked and pinned beneath this man who’d gone from gently reassuring to ruthlessly demanding in a flash. Her body, still stinging and throbbing in places from the way he’d punished her, her heart wrenched open so that she felt even more exposed, all of her flooded with building desire, impossibly craving more.
Maybe part of her had been dead, but if so, then another part had recently surged into vivid, needy life.
Ryan stared into her eyes, his steel gray and sharp. Face going into those stern ridges that so bizarrely made her want to yield up whatever he demanded. “Who am I, Celestina?”
His voice whispered over her nerves and she wasn’t sure how to answer. She struggled against his grip, an unthinking impulse to escape, but he held her easily.
“You have two possible answers,” he informed her, that note of warning in his tone. “You either use your safeword or you acknowledge me as your master still.”
Use her safeword? She could. Stop it all—she could go home or they’d maybe talk more about her many and varied emotional issues. Or she could call him her master and give herself up to whatever he had in mind. All the things she’d checked off as permissible in her reckless lust and disconcerting pitch of emotion. She couldn’t remember half of them but she had no doubt that he did.
“I’m giving you until the count of five,” he continued, measured and reasonable, as if he didn’t have her naked beneath him, the hard line of his cock hot against her groin. “One. Two.”
She should just say “Angel” and they could discuss. That would be the easiest option.
“Three.”
But she didn’t want to talk, or even think. She wanted to lose herself as she had before, in the rush of dizzying desire and the plummeting sensation of giving up control.
“Four.” He narrowed his eyes and lingered over the word. “Fi—”
“Master,” she whispered.
His eyes flared with silver light and his hands tightened on her wrists. “Who am I?” he asked again.
“Master.”
“Yes. And you are?”
She hesitated, slightly, and he growled in disapproval. Frightening and thrilling. “Yours?”
“Say it like you mean it,” he demanded.
“I’m yours, Master,” she breathed, the edges of her self beginning to dissolve in the truth of the moment.
“Who do you belong to?”
“You, Master.”
“That’s right. You’re mine. Bought and paid for. I can do whatever I wish to you and you can’t stop me. So what does that make you?”
“Your slave.” Bought and paid for.
“My naked, helpless slave.” He transferred her wrists to one hand, stretching them
higher, the leather of the couch cool against her skin, and trailed his other hand down her body, pushing it between her legs, into the slick heat that had resurged at his taking possession of her again. A moan escaped her and she strained against his hold, deliciously unable to free herself. “Tell me, did you have an orgasm before? Did my strap make you come?”
“I’m not sure, Master. Please don’t punish me.”
He studied her face, sliding a finger inside her and smiling in a cruel twist when she squirmed. “Why aren’t you sure?”
“It—” She gasped as he pushed in deeper. “It all blurred together. I don’t think I did.”
“Well, that’s a problem, isn’t it?” He mused over the question, as if it held great import. “I think we need to work on that. This is something you should be able to definitively answer, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know.” She answered without thinking, because she couldn’t with his hand working her so relentlessly.
“Wrong answer, my pet.” He removed his hand. “As my slave, you owe me anything I ask for, don’t you?”
“Yes, Master.” She writhed in misery now, not quite understanding why this worked on her as much as his hand had. Don’t think. Just feel. “I want to please you,” she burst out.
He smiled more genuinely then. “Better. We’re getting somewhere. Taste yourself on me.” He laid his fingers against her lips. Riveted, she opened her mouth, allowing him to push his fingers in, sucking on them, the sweetly salt taste of her own arousal filling her senses. “This pleases me,” he told her. “We’ll work on more.”
Abruptly he stood, yanked away the rest of the blanket and surveyed her nakedness. Reflexively, she started to lower her hands, to cover herself. “Hands stay where I put them,” he ordered in a cool tone. He continued to study her, from her face to her toes and back up again, his gaze as palpable as his caressing hand had been. Reaching over, he turned on a table lamp near her feet. “Spread your legs.”
She did, then raised her knees when he demanded that, too, keeping her hands stretched above her head and looking into the shadows of the ceiling while he looked his fill of her. Oddly warming to be on display like this, to be doing it entirely to please him. Master.
“Yes,” he replied, making her aware she’d whispered it. “Stand up.”
Scrambling to her feet, she stood on the plush Oriental rug, uncertain what to do with her hands. “Like this,” he told her, arranging her as he spoke. “When I tell you Stand, then arms at your sides, palms open and facing me, feet shoulder width apart, back straight, tits high, eyes cast down. Good.”
She held that position as he circled her, a sense of that relinquishing of will suffusing her, as it had when he’d locked the collar on her.
“Hands behind your neck, feet spread wide, tits high, eyes down.”
She followed the simple instructions, though her feet weren’t wide enough to please him. He coaxed her until she’d spread as wide as when he’d strapped her exposed pussy, the memory making her shudder and slicken both.
“This is Present,” he said, trailing his hand down her spine, to cup her bottom, then into her cleft so she wriggled. He smacked her ass, quite hard, making her wobble. “All of these positions you must hold no matter what I do, unless I tell you otherwise. Understand?”
“Yes, Master,” she replied, struggling for the calm that had evaporated with the sudden sting.
He came around in front of her. “Look at me.”
When she raised her eyes to his shadowed face, he cupped her breasts, squeezing. Then he brushed her sore nipples with his thumbs, making them spark with pain so that she nearly pushed his hands away, belatedly remembering to keep her hands behind her neck, leaving her breasts vulnerable to him. His lips twisted in that cruel line and he deliberately repeated the motion, watching to see what she’d do.
“Do they hurt?” he asked, not unkindly, and she nodded. When he released her breasts, she thought he’d stop tormenting them, but no. “Offer me your tits. That means to cup them in your hands and lift them up for me. Feet and eyes can stay wherever they are when I ask for this.”
His eyes glittered with amused arousal as she tried to comply, blushing furiously as he rearranged her hold on her own breasts to maximize his viewing pleasure. “Just like that—but arch your back. Really offer them to me. Show me that I can do whatever I like to them.”
She began to feel curiously out of her body with each passing moment, offering herself to him like this, acutely aware of her nakedness while he remained clothed. Holding her gaze, he slowly and deliberately took her proffered nipples and pinched them lightly, making her gasp.
“Shall I hurt them more?” he asked her.
Chewing on her lip in consternation, she searched his face for the right answer.
“If you want me to,” he said, “then you say, ‘Yes, Master.’ If not, you say, ‘Only if it pleases you, Master.’ That way, you never deny my pleasure, even to save yourself, but you can let me know how you feel. That might not change anything.” He grinned with his wicked charm. “But I’ll know. So, my beautiful Celestina—more pain?” He rolled her nipples and she whimpered.
“Only if it pleases you, Master.” She said it pleadingly, but he seemed all right with it, as he nodded and let go.
“Present.”
With a sense of reprieve, she did. Funny, as she could still safeword anytime. But she forgot that for long stretches in this game of his, where he made her feel as much or even more under his control than when he had her chained to the pillars. Perhaps because she chose to obey his soft directives, rather than being coerced. Though it didn’t feel like choosing. A different sort of coercion then.
“This one is more difficult,” he said from behind her, setting his hand on her back and pushing her to bend over. “Display. Everything the same except you bend over with your back flat.”
As she did, his hand moved over her hip, to slide familiarly into her folds again, one thick finger gliding into her so she moaned.
“Full display means to drop completely and grab your ankles, if you can. Ah yes—you’re nicely flexible.”
The blood rushed to her head, making it swim, the dizziness compounded when he added a second finger to the first, stretching her channel. “This is an excellent position for fucking,” he said in a conversational tone, as if his fingers weren’t doing exactly that. “Though it’s more strenuous for you. Also good for paddling.” He pulled his hand away and spanked her smartly, making her yip in surprise and struggle to keep her balance. Swiftly his fingers penetrated her again, three this time, by the feel. She groaned, the only protest available to her. “Or to alternate between the two,” he added.
Feeling increasingly out of control, she panted for breath, and pushed against his hand. He pulled it out and delivered several rapid smacks to her ass before finger-fucking her again. What would he do if she fell over? Probably much worse.
“Stay just like that.” He patted her bottom and moved away. Doing her best not to move, her palms slick where she clutched her ankles, ass high in the air and warmed by the fire, she felt on full display indeed. “Stand,” he said, and she obeyed with relief, straightening and dropping her arms to her sides, remembering to lower her eyes at the last moment—though not before she glimpsed him sitting in the armchair he’d been in when she arrived, a collar in his hands, though a different one this time. “A close one, though I’ll allow the error this once. Come over here and kneel.
“There are four kinds of kneeling. When I tell you Kneel, you may keep knees together, sit on your heels, hands palm up on your thighs. Kneel and present, hands go behind your neck and—exactly. Kneel up means thighs perpendicular to the floor, yes, and Kneel up and display means to spread your thighs. Wider, Celestina. You’re past being coy. Better. Kneel and display.”
She struggled to keep
her thighs open as she sat back on her heels, knowing he was looking straight into her open pussy. Silly, as he’d seen her from behind, and on the couch and draped over his desk. She felt more exposed this way, though, with her hands clasped behind her neck, kneeling in naked supplication because he demanded it, while her body churned with arousal.
“One more,” he told her softly. “Submit. Exactly as you are, but with your head bowed, arms stretched toward me and wrists crossed.” She did as he told her, then shivered at the feel of cuffs locking around her wrists again, followed by the collar around her throat. “Stay like that and listen.” He ran a hand over her hair. “Any time we’re in a scene, I might ask you to adopt one of these positions, and I expect you to obey immediately. I might tell you to strip first or not, as I wish. If you agree to any public scenarios, I expect you to follow these same rules, understand?”
She shivered at the prospect of assuming these positions in front of witnesses, possibly naked. Could she? Thrilling and terrifying. And only if she wanted to. She consoled herself with that reminder, though at that moment, feeling so thoroughly under his control, it didn’t seem that way. All part of the ride. “Yes, Master,” she whispered.
“Kneel up.” He took up a length of chain, smaller than the first one. It clinked musically in his hands. Threading it through what must be a loop in the front of the collar—also a different, lighter one—he then attached it to her cuffs. The cool metal draped between her breasts and fell in a swoop before rising to her wrists, but when he ordered her to Present, the chain came up under her breasts, framing them. Not satisfied, he adjusted the length so the chain snugged more tightly under them, lifting her breasts a little. Grunting in satisfaction, he reached behind her head and clipped the cuffs together there, so she couldn’t lower her hands.
Under Contract Page 17
