She thrust against my hands, head still back, eyes closed, breath fast and uneven. I kept my touch light, tantalizing, making her reach for it.
“Open your eyes, Mistress, watch, see what your body does. See how full and round, how hard and pointed, how straining toward my touch. Feel the pull, feel what you need, feel . . .” I licked with feather-light tongue one nipple and then the other, again and again, as her hands clenched on the copper rim and shuddering sighs tore from her throat. At last, just when I could not have borne it an instant longer, she grasped my head and forced my mouth hard onto her flesh and I sucked and bit at one nipple and then the other until her pleasure verged too closely onto pain.
I caught her hand and slid it down her belly and below, into the water. “Feel there, how beautiful, how tight and full.” I gently pushed her fingers aside and stroked her myself, just as lightly, then just as firmly, as her mounting need demanded.
“And here, lower, deeper, so deep, so pulsing.” I slid a finger between her nether lips and gently into her clinging heat and thought of raising her hips out of the water so that my tongue could probe her sweetness, but she was arching and thrusting against my hand with such hunger that I dared not withdraw it.
My mind melded into the pleasure-core of hers, touching her in the very ways and places that most filled and drove her need. I felt a flood of power greater than desire, as the strong body that could break me without effort writhed in unspoken pleading for what I could give. I slipped in another finger, and one more, and pressed my thumb against her as my fingers moved in the slippery depths.
“So beautiful a body,” I breathed against her mouth, leaning my breasts into hers. “So strong and sweet and surging with pleasure.” And so tuned was I now to her sensations that I rode the wave with her, gripping her wet thighs with mine as she arched her hips out of the bath in her driving need to be probed ever deeper and harder. If my hands were not enough I had other means in my silk-wrapped roll of “tools,” but it seemed impossible to move away long enough to reach for them.
Then her ragged moans resolved into a full-throated cry, and my own sobs of release began to rise, and the deeper roar that swept over us seemed only a part of the ecstatic whole – until the world crashed sideways, water swirled and metal clanged on wood, and we were spilled out onto the floor.
Nyal stood over us, all fury and solid flesh, pain twisting his face even as lust engorged his loins.
“You!” he bellowed at Domande. “You . . .” But words were too frail to bear his rage. He dragged her up, and she was too dazed (I dared not hope too wise) to resist.
I was not quite so dazed as to forget my little dagger, but what surged between these two they must resolve alone. Even when he slammed her against the wall I made no move to stop him.
Nor did she. He bound her wrists above her head with her own belt, looping it tightly over an iron game hook so that her feet barely touched the floor, and still she hung unresisting. He shoved his body roughly against hers, and I began to throb anew at the thought of his hardness pressing into her belly, but she was silent and the only cry came from his own raw throat.
“You!” He gasped for words. “The ice princess, the unmoved, the untouchable! But not so untouchable after all, not so cool.”
He wrenched himself away and turned his back to her. His gladiator’s body shone with sweat and the swollen head of his shaft gleamed even slicker than the rest.
“Nyal!” At last she found a voice. “You are free! I am defeated, I do not hold you, you may do as you will.”
He should have turned, should have let her see in his face that he would never be free of her. But instead he lurched toward me and twisted his hand in my hair and forced me to my knees.
“Ease me, girl,” he grated. He may have thought to punish me, and her, but he had stabbed her deeper than he knew. I could not tell him what a fool he was; a slave’s training runs too deeply. And what pressed against my face was too full and throbbing.
I took him into my mouth and teased his slippery tip with my tongue as I reached to stroke between his thighs, using all my skills at the game of stimulation and prolongation. He struck my hand away. “Just ease me, slut, quickly!”
He had been hard, after all, one way or another, for more than a fortnight. I brought him swiftly over the edge. His spending burst hot and metallic into my mouth and all the way down my throat.
The silence following his final gasp might have been seconds, or minutes, or hours. He slumped against the wall, head down. When finally I looked to my mistress she seemed at first immobile; but her long smooth muscles were tensed and I saw that she tested the strength of the wall-hook holding her.
I ran with my knife to cut her down, but her blazing eyes held me off. “Get away! And you,” she spat at Nyal, “take your freedom while you may!” She began to arch her body in rhythmic convulsions, and the wood around the hook started to splinter.
“Why so slow to run?” she taunted, panting slightly from her exertion. “Hiding in stone again?” And indeed he seemed frozen, watching her strong, beautiful body strain at its bonds. “For her you are all eager flesh, but for me only stone! Such a Gorgon as I must be!”
“No!” He sounded strangled. “It is a curse in the blood! My grandsire had the skill to wield it as a defense, but I had not known it was in me until . . .”
“Until what?” she challenged. A final lurch brought the iron hook tearing from the wall, and Nyal ducked as it shot past just over his head. I dared to dart forward to cut the belt still bound around my lady’s wrists, but neither of them paid me any heed.
A slow smile lit Nyal’s face. Only then, I think, did the last of the stone leave his system. “Until I was tormented past bearing by a rival and comrade who seemed untouched by the fire she lit in me.”
“Did you think me so untouched?” Rage abruptly gone, she let the whisper of a smile curve her lips. “Try me.”
Her wrestling stance would have horrified Hecanthe, who had wanted me to teach her “a woman’s proper weapons,” but the two gleaming bodies testing and striving against each other understood far better than I the erotic tension of strength on strength.
They began with classic wrestling moves, scarcely stirring for long moments as flesh strained against taut flesh. Nyal’s shoulders were broader, but Domande’s lithe dexterity countered his strength so that they were evenly matched.
He was instantly, magnificently aroused, despite his recent release. This might have given my lady the advantage, but her own tasting of her body’s hungers had served only to increase them. She put her mouth to sweaty muscles straining to break her hold, brushed hard-swollen nipples against his heaving chest, then turned to clasp his probing shaft between tensed buttocks before a swivel and thrust of her hip sent him to his knees.
Any resemblance to formal wrestling crumbled then. He grasped her hips and pressed his mouth into her belly, and she pushed his head downward toward the dark-honey curls between her thighs, and though my link to her was fading I knew by her gasps just where his tongue and hands caressed her.
When he pulled her off balance and pinned her shoulders to the floor she resisted only enough to savor the friction. His hardness stroked and probed her slippery tenderness until she raised her hips for him to plunge in all the deeper and gripped his thrusting buttocks with her long, strong legs.
Her moans grew rougher and more demanding. Suddenly, with a great heave, she flipped him to his back. He cried out, but she covered his mouth with her own, then raised upright until she was riding him hard astride, and his groans came between clenched teeth as he fought to hold on until at last her head went back and a cry of triumph tore from her throat.
My link was gone. Just the sight and sound of them made me wild with longing. I could not have told which of them I would rather hold, which rather be, but there was no one to ease me now, and I did not know how to bear it. Slavery had never been such agony.
I picked up my cloak and slipped out th
rough the ruined hall, past the horses, and into the night. With no clear goal I made my way along the overgrown road as quickly as moonlight would allow, mind and body in such turmoil that I nearly stumbled into a horse and rider coming toward me.
“Riette!” Eyes wide with shock stared down at me from a bearded face. I turned and ran, and the deep voice rumbled again, cracking in pain, “Riette, come back!”
I reached the lodge just ahead of him and burst into the kitchen. “Mistress! Someone comes!”
Nyal leaped to his feet and grabbed my lady’s sword, but she stayed him with a gesture. The giant figure looming in the doorway fixed his eyes on me as though I were a ghost, until the firelight revealed that mine was not quite the face in his dreams. His great head bowed for a moment; then he shook off past sorrow and turned to my mistress.
“You are looking very fit, Domande.” His tone was dry as he glanced from her naked flesh to Nyal’s.
“Never better, Father.” She grinned like an urchin, and his answering smile was a mirror of hers. His hair was a darker, grizzled version of her bronze curls, and his eyes beneath heavy brows glinted with the same green-amber flame.
He moved as though to embrace her, but suddenly drew back and lowered himself to his knees. “Lady Domande.” His tone was now measured and formal. “Your father the King is dead. The Council entreats you to return to lead your people.”
Her face turned pale and set. “Do you think I would renounce my father the General?”
He rose wearily to his feet, leather armor creaking over massive shoulders. “No need of that. The people are not deceived, but they judge that your blood-claim through Queen Riette is sufficient. Your strength is needed to resist the encroachment of the Empire; backed, of course, by my strength and the loyalty of my troops.”
“And mine.” Nyal laid his arm across her shoulders; when she did not shake it off he tightened it into an embrace. The General cocked an enquiring brow.
‘“Then so it shall be.” Domande’s face was serene with assurance and fulfillment. “Shebbah.” She turned to me, and I felt the General’s weary eyes on me as well. “There are no slaves in my country, and there are none here. But it would be good of you to help the General to remove his armor and bathe away the dust of travel. Will you give him ease while Nyal and I go to view the river by moonlight?”
“I will, Lady.” It was hard not to call her mistress. As I took the older man’s callused hand it jerked and then tightened on mine, and I felt the link take hold. I knew, now, who would give me ease, whose great strong body would press mine into submission, who would demand all I could give and fill me with all I desired.
Or almost all. I let one lingering glance caress Domande’s smoothly muscled form as she went through the door, then turned my full heart and mind toward the Master whose need was greatest.
Against the Wall
Catherine Paulssen
The humming of a building crane and monotonous strike of a distant hammer beat heavily through the idleness of the summer afternoon as Annie let her eyes wander over the groups of soldiers lingering across from her perch on the watchtower – the men from the 8th Infantry Division on her side of the barbwire and slabs of concrete, the Russian soldiers gathering with members of the East German police corps on the other.
None of them seemed to have anything particular to do. They looked as calm as the air that hung leaden over the city. But she knew the soldiers on West Berlin ground had a sharp eye on what was happening on the other side of the border, which would soon be manifested with a wall much taller than a man’s height. They were watching the enemy, on the lookout for even the slightest commotion that could be a sign of people trying to escape to freedom.
The Soviet soldiers that guarded the construction site on the eastern side were looking for the exact same thing.
Two weeks ago, they had started to build the wall, and ever since that day, fugitives had been fleeing the eastern part of the city. Officially, the US troops and the Allied forces stationed around them didn’t interfere. But it was an open secret that they would help anyone who made an attempt to choose their side.
Annie sighed a little. Even though the soldiers appeared to have hardly anything to do, she would trade her work as a cryptographer any time for their tasks. She had never been one for staying inside, and she would happily exchange her uniform and pumps for her male comrades’ boots and fatigues. She scratched her neck, slightly sticky with a sheen of sweat. At least the skirt was a welcome relief for the summer, one of the hottest that Europe had seen in decades.
She reached for a field glass and let her gaze wander over the Soviet soldiers leaning against a fence. To her, they all looked the same. Tall and pale-skinned, but with red cheeks and a slightly defiant, proud expression around their lips. One, though, stood out from the crowd. His stout figure gave him an angular appearance, but his gestures when he talked weren’t stodgy or gruff at all. His face was round and open.
She would sometimes catch sight of him on her strolls outside the command post, and her heart would always beat a bit faster, though she couldn’t exactly figure out why. He wasn’t supposed to make her feel that way, after all. She was a county commissioner’s daughter from the Midwest, she believed in the Apollo mission, Elvis Presley and the New York Yankees.
He was a captain serving a Communist regime.
Now he took off his cap and wiped his forehead. She adjusted the binocular to take a closer look. His light blond hair was just a bit too long. Not so much that it would get him into trouble with regulations, but enough for her to see that any further inch could. She imagined him losing himself in tunes played by forbidden radio stations as soon as his daily duty was over.
“Second Lieutenant McMillan,” came a voice behind her. She turned and saluted the First Lieutenant. “Keeping a close watch on the enemy?”
“I . . .”
“You know you’re not supposed to be up here,” he said. His voice was stern, but she could see an amused glimmer in his eyes.
“I’m sorry, sir. But I’m off duty,” she hurried to add.
“Even more reason,” he said good-naturedly.
“Yes, sir.”
That night, when she went to bed in her cabin, sleep didn’t find her for hours. She blamed the sticky air, but the true culprit, she knew deep down, must have been the Soviet soldier.
“You can’t go out there now!” Mae protested. “Look!” She pointed at the window, where towering grey clouds had darkened the sky so much that the late afternoon looked more like evening. Thunder was rolling in the distance.
“I have to. My mother gave me that watch before I left for Europe!” Annie grabbed her garrison cap and gave her friend a look that sought her understanding. “I know where I must have lost it. I’ll be back before the storm gets here.”
Before Mae could further object, Annie ran out of the office building that hosted their command post and headed straight for the construction line. When she reached the deserted no man’s land, the first drops of rain began to fall. Heavy, thick blobs soon speckled the dusty ground with dark spots. She threw a glance at the clouds being chased by the wind. No way would she return now, even if the price to pay was getting soaked to the bone. She’d probably lost her watch while strolling here during lunch break today, and she silently cursed herself for not having replaced its threadbare strap earlier.
Through an opening where the barbed wire hadn’t already been replaced with cement slabs, she could see some workers running into a shed and the lights being turned on in the Russian barracks. The machines stood still, and all she could hear was the thunder’s glowering rumble. She passed a pile of cobblestones that smelled as only stones could in the middle of a city when the summer rain made their smooth surface shine.
Careful not to come too close to the fence while keeping her eyes on the ground, she startled when a glaring bolt of lightning tore through the gloom. Thunder followed a moment later; hard and striking, it pierced the air w
ith its force. As if on command, the raindrops multiplied. Soon enough, her cord jacket was soggy, and she could feel the wetness nibbling at her shirt. She turned up the collar of the jacket to prevent streaks of water from trickling down her wet hair onto her neck.
Big puddles formed on the ground. She hadn’t expected them to cover the site that quickly, but suddenly, she found herself in the middle of a vast lake with only a few islands of mud scattered across it. The raindrops bounced off the surface of the water like shiny little pearls glistening whenever a flash of light hit them. She stuffed her cap into the pocket of her jacket and started to jump from mud speck to mud speck, unable to see much ahead of her, so thick was the curtain of water lashing down. Realizing she had come quite close to the wall, she paused and looked for a place to wait for the thunderstorm to pass. Suddenly, she felt a hand grabbing her shoulder. She shrieked and turned to find the bear-like Soviet soldier standing right next to her.
“Nje,” he said, making a gesture with his fingers, then pointing to where they were standing. She looked at him with wide eyes, and he added the word “Gefahr”, his voice loud to drown out the rushing of the wind and water.
She thought she knew the meaning of that German word. “You mean it’s dangerous to be here?”
He nodded. “Dangerous.”
His accent was hard, but it was softened by the concern in his voice. She ducked her head as another flash of lightning darted from above. “But there’s no one around, and I know the area.”
Did she see his mouth twitch in the dazzling white light? He said something in Russian, then shook his head. “Woman nje out. Dangerous.”
“I’m not a woman. I’m a second lieutenant in the Women’s Army Corps of the United States of America.” She raised her chin and tried her best not to blink as the raindrops hit her eyes.
For a moment, he frowned, and she wondered if he suddenly realized that she was, after all, the enemy. But then he broke out in loud laughter, a laughter so hearty, it couldn’t be swallowed even by the grumbling thunder. “Come,” he said curtly.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 12: Over 40 outstanding pieces of short erotic fiction (Mammoth Books) Page 35