"Fifteen," Alan repeated firmly, his lips so close to her that they brushed the shell of her ear. "I promise, it's going to be enough."
"It's never enough."
He could hear the tears thick in her whispered voice, and her next flinch came—not when he tapped her thigh with the cane, but when he wrapped his arm around her waist to rest his open hand on the trim plane of her belly. He imagined he could feel the nervousness tumbling just under her skin, but no, she had begun to tremble.
"Today, fifteen will be enough."
A tiny wave of goosebumps broke out across her skin as he stepped back, moving into position at her left. The swells of her bottom were still flushed from her earlier spanking, but it had been too long for that to have been an effective warm-up to soften the severity of what he was about to give her.
Alan measured his area of attack, touching the cane across the top of her buttocks just a little below where the crack between them began. Any higher, and she would feel it in her back. He touched the backs of her thighs next. If he kept his strokes tight and even, he could lay a ladder of eight all the way down to the sensitive crease where her bottom began. Another two would take him down onto the very tops of her thighs. Those would be hard to bear, but nowhere near as hard as the last five were going to be. Because no matter what he did after that, his strokes were going to overlap.
He reached for her, cupping the nape of her neck in his broad hand. "Don't move."
He didn't use the full strength of his arm; just enough to give the cane a good snap, and with no more than five seconds between strokes, he built his ladder of welts. The first made her suck air. By the fourth, she was shouting, and by the time he was laying in those last fiery five, slanting those diagonally across her buttocks to turn the ladder into a lattice, Tavy lost the ability to stand. Though she clung to the pillar as if it were the only thing keeping her alive, he dropped her to her knees. Because pain was what she needed, Alan took great care in giving it to her, and he did not stop until he had delivered exactly what he'd promised.
Chapter Seven
Lying on her stomach, her eyes bleary with sleep, Tavy awoke the next morning in a rumpled bed of satin and pillows. An arm and tufts of black hair were sticking up out of the blankets beside her. It wasn't until she heard Master Alan's rattling snore, and saw the black padded cuffs binding her wrists to a bondage ring in the wall of the bed, that she remembered where she was and why.
Lifting her head off her arms, she craned for a better look at the man snoring softly beside her. He hadn't fucked her, not once, all night long. That was a first for her. Usually, that was one of the first things her Castle-appointed Tops did. Out of all she'd had thus far, only one other hadn't bent her over at least once—and that was because he'd been too old. Not even the little blue pill had helped, and he'd popped so many she'd started to worry about him. Eventually, he'd given up on getting his cock hard enough to use, and resorted instead to inserting other things, opening every vibrator and dildo package that came in their room's fully-stocked toy box. He'd even put his cellphone inside her, just to see what would happen when it vibrated.
She stared at Master Alan, not at all sure what to make of the man. He looked so peaceful and calm. Of course, he was calm when he was awake, too. Calm and quiet. Seemingly so gentle, although gentleness had definitely not been in his repertoire while he'd been holding that cane in his hand.
A tiny blossom of heat unfurled in the pit of her belly. She'd never wanted to associate anything she experienced here with something pleasant, and last night hadn't been, but those lines were blurring now. With the soft glow of early morning filtering in through the drawn balcony curtains, with that warmth spreading through her stomach, the memory of how it had felt when Alan pried her arms from around the pillar to bring her down into this bed began to distort. She had liked it when he'd stretched out beside her, folding her in his arm just to hold her while she sobbed. Even the intensity of the pain as it melded into her flanks, becoming a dull burning throb, began to evoke erotic nuances. She wanted to reach back and, through one touch, relive a little… but when she tried, the wrist cuffs clicked against the bondage ring and the snoring beside her ceased.
Not yet prepared to face him, Tavy dropped back onto her arms and pretended to be asleep.
Unnatural silence stretched on for what seemed like forever, filling the bed. Any minute now, she expected him either to move or to start snoring again. When he did neither, the itch-like need to steal a peek became more than she could resist. She knew she was caught. Even before she opened her eyes she knew it, but seeing him with his head raised just high enough to stare back at her—those black, black eyes of his fathomless, and his sinfully kissable lips quirking into a knowing smile—made her stomach sink and her heart leap, and neither was a particularly welcome sensation.
Sinfully kissable? Seriously?
"You're beautiful when you're being deceitful," he drawled, rising up on one elbow to better see her.
Damn it.
Tavy tried to roll away, needing to avoid the hypnotic pull of his gaze, but her wrist restraints were unyielding and the minute she shifted from her belly onto her side, her bottom tapped up against a pillow. Soft as it was, that slight tap reawakened every nerve-ending the cane had assaulted the night before. She gasped, flopping immediately back onto her belly, but the damage was done. Heat pulsed and flared, ravaging her in wounded waves.
"Oh my God," she groaned.
"Sore?" Alan grinned, far from sympathetic. Cupping his head on his hand, he made himself comfortable in the wake of her growing discomfort. "Perhaps a kiss or two might help make it better."
Just the thought of his lips nibbling their way across her bottom, moving from welt to aching welt, made the heated wetness between her legs pulse and throb—and every other inch of her want to run.
"I have to go to the bathroom," she finally said.
"Do you?" he countered, making no move to either release her or get up himself.
"Are you going to make me beg?" It was the wrong thing to say, and she knew it the minute she did.
A glint of amusement flickered through the black of his eyes. He pretended to consider it. "Yes, I think I will."
Her face flamed, a slow flush of heat that stole up from her sex and into her stomach, forging an unerring path through her chest, all the way to her cheeks. Flustered, she compared how badly she had to go with how long she thought she could try to outwait him. The look on his face said he was prepared to be stubborn. Her face burned even hotter. "May I please go to the bathroom, Master Alan?"
"I think I might allow that." And yet, when he sat up, it wasn't her wrists he reached for. With a sweep of his arm, he stripped the blankets and sheet from them both.
Oh Lord, he was naked, and when he swiveled onto one hip, his weight braced up on one strong arm and one bent knee while he leaned over to examine her tender bottom, there was nothing left for her reeling imagination to wonder at.
He wasn't the largest man she had ever seen, but he was by no means the smallest. What he lacked in length (if, indeed, he lacked anything at all), he more than made up for in girth. He was trim and toned all the way down to his neatly manicured feet, hairless apart from the well-groomed thatch of short curls that crowned his pubis, and, wrapping his right side from the front of his hip to the back of his ribs, was a barbed wire and roses tattoo.
She jumped when his hand settled on the back of her left thigh.
"Shh, shh," he soothed, his feather-light fingertips tracing lines of instant soreness across the lower swells of her buttocks. "You've got some fine marks here. No cuts, but you'll be sitting tenderly for a while."
His touch hurt, and yet it felt good. In questing probes, he sought out all the raw places, kicking up the heat and the hurt until wounded throbbing filled her. For anyone else, she would have lain as still as death, absorbing the hurt as part of her penance. But with him, she was having trouble remembering this was penance at all. Mol
ten tickles slipped from her, trickling along the folds of her labia, something she hadn't felt in this place for such a very long time.
She had to get out of his reach. He was ruining her, taking this experience into places she was terrified to go. One word, that was all she had to say to stop this and yet she balked, her lips locking together and the safeword sticking in her throat.
"Shh," he said again, caressing now. His fingers squeezed, first one fleshy globe and then the other, parting her buttocks as if to see how she would react to the invasion. If he thought her an anal virgin, then he didn't know his own Castle very well. She'd lost that particular cherry her first time here.
His eyes never left her face and yet, when his fingers moved down into the crack of her buttocks, skimming lightly across the surface of her anus, experienced or not, her whole body blushed hot. She locked her eyes on her arm, each breath coming fast upon the heels of the last, her senses spinning—and yet unable to do anything but lie tense, her legs pressing as tight together as she could make them while his hand bypassed her less than useless defenses.
"Open for me," he coaxed.
She didn't dare. She struggled to feel nothing, but only tensed that much more when his fingers slipped down past her back entrance and found her pussy instead.
"Open." He teased her, feeling her wetness, filling the air with the scent of her arousal and the sounds it made as his fingers played in it. Slick, wet, watery sucking sounds.
"I really have to pee," she said, her pitch too high and quavering.
He stroked up and down her slit, dipping the tips of his fingers into her with each gentle pass. He saturated his hand and, when he removed it from between her thighs, his fingers glistened in the early morning light. Her arousal perfumed the air.
His dark eyes locked onto hers while he licked the tip of one finger, savoring her flavor. "Mm," was all he said, but it made the nerves in her belly flame hotter than a furnace. He unhooked her wrists from the bondage ring then, but did not remove the cuffs or even separate them. "Go."
Tavy scrambled from the bed. She made her way across the room as stately as she knew how, and yet it still felt like fleeing. She got the door closed without slamming it, but there was no lock. She felt like a coward for even looking, and then all the more so for flattening herself against the door, her ears straining for any hint he might be following her. She buried her head in her hands, for a moment so helplessly lost that she almost cried. She had to get a grip on this. She pressed her hands over her abdomen, rubbing in an effort to still the fluttering need.
The bathroom was huge, tiled in white with strips of metallic red that raced around the walls midway up. The shower would comfortably hold four people, with bondage rings sporadically set into the back tiles and a clear glass door that offered no obstruction to anyone watching from outside. And the mirrors… they were everywhere. No matter where she looked, all she saw were different angles of her own blushing reflection, including the angle offered directly behind her from the mirror hanging on the back of the door. She couldn't help it. Twisting around, she caught her first glimpse at what he'd done to her ass last night. As sore as she was, she expected far worse than what she found. Instead of massive bruising, only a few thin lines of red marred the expanse of what was otherwise unmarked flesh.
A thin thread of disappointment wound through her. That was the last thing she expected to feel, too.
"Three minutes," Alan called from the other side of the door. "Then I'm coming in, and anything you're not finished doing you're going to have an audience for."
She didn't for a second think he was kidding.
Shoving off the door, Tavy grabbed a towel from the rack over the toilet. It took a lot of wrangling to get it wrapped around her with her hands cuffed together. It was only marginally better getting through her morning toilet. Blushing furiously, she was just leaning over the sink to wash her hands when the door opened and Master Alan walked in. He hadn't bothered to dress yet. Lines of hard muscles rippled under the natural olive-tan of his skin as he headed straight for the toilet, seeming completely at ease with his nudity.
"No towel," he told her, bending to lift the lid.
Tavy quickly turned away, but there was no place in that suddenly way too small bathroom that she could look where the mirrors didn't reflect him. He had no shame. He peed with her standing right there and, when she tried to edge past him and out the door, snagged the back of her towel to stay her.
"We'll shower together," he said, flushing the toilet before heading for the sink. "And I meant what I said about losing the towel, or do we need to start the day with a punishment?"
"No, Master Alan." But her pussy pulsed, a single throb of uncomfortable awareness amplified by the brush of his fingers at her back when he stripped her towel away. One day down; she still had three more to go with this man. How was she going to survive that if she couldn't get him out of her head?
She had to distance herself. She tried to pretend she was alone, or that he was someone—anyone—else. But her nipples still tightened, and it wasn't because the bathroom was cold. She'd never reacted like this with any of them. She needed to get back into that penitent frame of mind, force her uncooperative body to stop feeling, and definitely to stop wanting him. Tavy couldn't afford to want anybody; much less the dark-eyed devil washing his hands behind her.
"Are you ready to attend me, little slave?" he asked as she turned on the faucet, holding her hand under the shower until the temperature felt right.
She glanced back over her shoulder at him, fighting hard not to envision how it would feel to wash down a body like his. "What do you want me to do?"
He walked up beside her to test the water. Finding it to his liking, he said, "Get in."
She held up her arms for him to remove her cuffs, but he made no move to oblige her. Pointing to the shower, he snapped his fingers.
"One," he warned, as if she were five years old. "Two…"
Tavy stepped into the shower, retreating halfway under the spray. It hit her mid-waist, the warm rivulets flowing down her body in streams as she watched him take a washcloth from the towel rack and unwrap a thin bar of herbal-scented soap from the complimentary dish by the sink. Handing both to her, he stepped in just behind her. Putting his back to the spray, he faced her, his hands at his sides, that glint of dark amusement she knew better than to trust dancing in the depths of his eyes. Soap in one hand and washcloth in the other, it didn't take a genius to figure out what he was waiting for.
"Eight thousand is an awful lot for a bath attendant." Spacious as the shower was, she still had to edge past him to wet the cloth. Every accidental brush of her arm against his sent sparking jolts zinging through her skin.
"That would depend on how it ends. Personally, I'm hoping for a happy one."
Just the thought of putting her hand on his cock had her fumbling with the soap. She almost dropped it. She didn't know why she was so nervous. It was nothing short of miraculous that he'd waited this long. She tried to keep her eyes on her hands, but her gaze stole south of his waist, taking in his semi-flaccid state.
"I do believe that cloth is as lathered as it's going to get."
Tavy set the soap on a little ledge in a corner of the tile wall. Now there was nothing left to do but grip the washcloth between her bound hands, put it on his skin, and start scrubbing. Her mouth ran dry, and her heart skipped all the way up into the back of her throat. Her pussy pulsed; constant thrums of erotic awareness. She searched, but she couldn't see a single place on him that looked safe to touch.
His mouth began to curl again. She hated it when he looked at her like that.
This was ridiculous. She couldn't just stand there, staring at him as if she'd never touched a man before. Touch him already.
After two aborted starts, she laid the cloth on his chest. Watery lather trickled out between her fingers and rolled down the back of her hand. Washing him felt like something forbidden, but she did it. Chest first, the
n his shoulders. They were broad and masculine, with solid-feeling biceps, and forearms that were thick and veined. He had wide hands too, each of his fingers almost twice the size of hers. Her skin next to his was surprisingly pale.
"Where are you from?" The question was out of her mouth before she could stop herself. She'd never before, not with anyone, been tempted to break her own rule about getting personal with the men who topped her.
"Seattle." If he noticed her panicked pause, he didn't show it. "My mother is Egyptian. My father, Italian. I am, according to my grandparents, the best of two very old worlds. What about you?"
The barn door was open and the horse truly gone, and she had no one to blame for it but herself. Having started the conversation, it seemed silly and childish not to hold up her end.
"Right here," she answered reluctantly.
"Granger?"
"Born and raised." Returning the washcloth to his chest, she moved down to his stomach. Her hand trembled in spite of her efforts to quell it. He wasn't semi-soft anymore. His cock was standing, straining toward her, and the longer she stared at it, the more her mouth ran dry.
"Hm," he said, non-committal. Turning, he presented her with the equal beauty of his back—wide at the shoulders and trim at the waist, with countless tiny droplets of water running off him. She had the most absurd urge to lean in and lick one. "What do you do for a living?" He glanced back over his shoulder as he spoke, that faint smile of his softening what might otherwise have shut her down faster than a slamming door. "When you're not robbing people, of course."
It was a perfectly normal conversation; the sort one would expect while getting to know a blind date over coffee, but her stomach still twisted. Maybe because there wasn't enough washcloth to keep her hands from accidentally touching him, skin to wet, soapy skin, no matter how careful she tried to be. He truly was sinful… every inch of him a temptation she was aching not to resist. She followed his back to his butt—God, he had a gorgeous butt—lowering herself to her knees as she lightly scrubbed her way down the backs of his legs. "I go to school."
When The Gavel Falls (Masters of the Castle) Page 68
