She stared at him for a moment, shook her head.
He said, “Come now, surely you’re a little curious. You see, this knob is actually connected to a screw. If one turns it, like so”—he gave it a short twist, making her gasp—“it causes the steel petals that form the pear to spread outward, rather like a flower opening up. The more one turns it, the wider it opens, eventually producing a fair degree of pain and mutilation—and, in many cases, death. In times past, la poire was employed both for punishment and to extract confessions. The sin of the accused would determine into which body cavity it would be inserted, sometimes coated with some noxious or caustic substance. Heretics would take it in the mouth, sodomites in the ass. Of course, for strums such as yourself, the orifice of choice was Cock Alley.”
He turned the knob again. Charlotte began to writhe and twist, struggling against her bonds, more from fear, he knew, than from discomfort; he’d barely begun to expand it.
“Don’t like the feel of it in that pampered little snatch of yours, eh? As it would happen, I’ve other plans for it.” He screwed the pear closed and slid it out.
Lifting the brown bottle from the bottom shelf, Darius pulled out the stopper and dribbled a yellowish, syrupy fluid over the tip of the pear, turning it this way and that until it was well coated.
Charlotte shook her head wildly, emitting muffled protestations.
“It’s olive oil,” he said dryly as he restoppered the bottle and put it back. “For the lamps.”
Charlotte closed her eyes and turned away from him, clearly as embarrassed as she was relieved.
“You see, the aperture for which this device is destined,” he said as he spread the cheeks of her ass, “is somewhat less accommodating than—”
She bucked and thrashed as she realized where he was about to insert the pear.
“Be still,” he demanded, forcing compliance by pressing down hard on the small of her back. “My intent is not to injure you, merely to stretch you a bit. The pear will remain inside you, gradually expanding, until you’ve learned not to merely tolerate it, but to find it arousing. You’ll thank me for it when that which you once found painful elicits instead a rare degree of pleasure.”
She looked dubious, but she stopped squirming.
This time, when he spread her cheeks, she lay still and rigid, her eyes squeezed shut. She flinched as he pressed the pear’s slick, rounded base into her, penetrating only half an inch or so before her body tightened around the intrusion.
“Ease up,” he told her as he twisted and pushed, making little headway. “If you’re tense, ’twill only make it hurt. You’re taking it either way—you’ve no choice in the matter—so you may as well open up and accept it.”
She nodded, drew in a breath, and let it out.
This time, when he pushed, the pear slid in a good inch, thanks in large part to its slippery coating of oil. “That’s it,” he murmured as he worked it in deeper, deeper. “That’s it.” Reaching between her legs with his free hand, he cupped her smooth, warm sex. “You may come now for being such a good girl.”
She bore down, rubbing her wet slit and stiff little clit against his fingers, and again and again, hips thrusting in a carnal rhythm. With every upthrust, Darius shoved the pear a little deeper, wriggling it a bit to enhance the internal stimulation. The more she associated such stimulation with pleasure, the more satisfying it would be for both of them when his cock was inserted where the pear was now.
By the time he’d buried its entire length inside her, Charlotte was in a paroxysm of lust. The bed creaked with every thrust against his now-slippery hand.
Charlotte screamed through her gag as she spent her passion, grinding wildly against his hand. Darius frigged her with shallow thrusts of the pear, caressing her gently as her pleasure ebbed, then more purposefully as it renewed itself. She spent thrice more, and would doubtless have continued to do so had Darius indulged her wordless pleas for release, but for now, his own need for release had become far too distracting to ignore.
He untied her legs from the rope bed, then helped her to rise off it and stand up. “If I take off your restraints,” he asked, “can you be trusted to comport yourself as if you were still wearing them?”
Charlotte nodded, whereupon he unlocked and removed first the brank, then the straight belt. Without being prompted, she clasped her hands behind her waist, standing with her shoulders back, breasts outthrust.
He circled her, appraising her posture and nodding in approval. “Take down your hair,” he said.
She did so. It fell to her waist in a thick, gleaming braid. “Shall I unplait it?” she asked.
“Nay, leave it as it is. But give me those,” he said, indicating her handful of little diamond-studded hairpins. “Are they real or paste?” he asked, holding one up to admire in the torchlight.
“Real, of course.”
He shoved them into his pocket. She looked as if she was about to object, but she stilled her tongue.
He pointed to the mattress on the floor. “Down.”
She stepped onto the mattress and began lowering herself to her knees, forcing him to remind her to turn away from him first. This she did, then knelt and bent forward with her hands still clasped behind her, head down.
He flicked open the buttons of his trouser flap, savoring as he did the sight of the pear’s beautifully crafted knob emerging from between the cheeks of her ass, with its neatly spaced embroidery of welts. Her pussy was wet, red, and wide open. Kneeling behind her, he grabbed her hips and filled her with a single, slick lunge that forced a startled cry of pleasure from her.
He wrapped her braid around his fist like a horse’s rein and fucked her with sharp, deep strokes, relishing her posture of submission, her meekness, her complete surrender to his will. On the verge of coming, he paused and twisted the knob of the pear, just enough so that he could feel it widening inside her, making her as snug as a fist. She moaned at the added pressure, but voiced no objection.
He twisted the knob again.
“Stop, I beg you,” she implored.
Darius yanked on the braid, jerking her head up and forcing her back into a nice, ass-hiking curve. “We have a covenant, you and I. ’Tis my place to decide what you can bear, and yours to take it. Is that not what you agreed to?” He dealt her bum a stinging smack, the red-wealed flesh hot beneath his palm; she cried out in a way that he found intensely arousing. “Is it not?”
“I…Y-yes, but—”
“But?” Still pulling on the braid, he slapped her again, harder. “Mouthy little scab.” And again. “Bitch.” And again, and again…“Jade. Trollop. Whore.”
He knelt unmoving with his cock deep inside her, every slap reverberating through her sex and into his, the rhythmic vibrations making him achingly, impossibly hard, driving him closer, closer…
She’d wanted to be spank-fucked; now she had her wish, but on his terms, not hers. Not that she didn’t enjoy it. Either because of the pain, or in spite of it, she was wet and swollen, her initial trepidation replaced by guttural moans as she pushed back against him in an effort to take him even deeper, harder.
“Be still.” Withdrawing halfway, Darius pried her hands apart and shoved them between her legs, ordering her to stroke his cock and balls but not to dare touch herself. “You have to earn the right to come.”
He kept still while she did as he’d ordered, but her soft, cool caress soon had his entire body shaking, his breath shuddering. He climaxed explosively, and with a shout that echoed like thunder throughout the cellar.
Once he’d regained his breath, he withdrew from her, inciting a little whimper of frustration on her part. Rising to his feet, he refastened his trousers with palsied hands. “You may spend when you’ve been good and obedient,” he said, “not when you’ve whined and complained and questioned my…”
Looking down at her, he saw that the right cheek of her ass, the one he’d spanked, was alarmingly red, the welts so inflamed he was surprised none had s
tarted bleeding.
“Mon Dieu,” he muttered, appalled at how close he had come to really hurting her—to wanting to hurt her. His control was slipping, a sign that he was losing his grip on Darius, the real Darius, and becoming, in his heart and soul, the pitiless rakehell she wanted him to be.
Charlotte turned her head slightly to look at him, as if wondering what was wrong. He should have chastised her for moving out of position, but he didn’t. Taking the door key from his pocket, he went out to the hallway to draw a bucket of water from the well. This he set next to the mattress, along with the chamber pot from beneath the bed.
“I’m going upstairs to get something to eat.” To get away from her, actually, away from her maddening influence on him, but it wouldn’t do to let her know the effect she was having on him, the unwitting power she wielded over him. “Wash yourself while I’m gone.” He pulled out his handkerchief and tossed it in front of her. “Be quick about it, then resume your position. I’ll expect to find you just as you are when I come back.”
Indeed, when he returned about half an hour later, Charlotte was precisely as he’d left her, crouched facedown on the mattress with her hands clasped at the small of her back. The chamber pot and bucket were tucked into a corner, with the damp handkerchief neatly draped over a crossbar of the hanging cage, like laundry hanging out to dry—a domestic touch he wouldn’t have anticipated. Charlotte followed him with her eyes as he approached, a dinner tray in one hand, lantern in the other.
Hanging the lantern on a ceiling hook, Darius lifted her head by the braid and set down the tray, which held three stone china bowls and a folded napkin. “Eat,” he said, indicating the largest bowl, which contained soupe au chou left over from the servants’ supper, the broth drained off so all that remained was a mound of cabbage, bacon, and potatoes amid flecks of aromatic herbs and vegetables. The two smaller bowls were filled with wine.
Clearly dismayed that he expected her to dine without the use of her hands, crouched over her food like a dog, Charlotte said, “I…I’m not really—”
“I won’t have you swooning from hunger while I’ve still some use for you.” Darius leaned against a column, arms crossed, and watched her. “Eat.”
Charlotte regarded the soup for a long, bleak moment, and then she took a tentative nibble of potato.
“Good girl,” he said.
She used her teeth to pick up the rest of the chunk of potato and ate that, and then some bacon, some cabbage, some more potato…
“Don’t neglect your wine,” he said. “The bowl on the left contains Spanish fly. That on the right is unadulterated. You may have whichever you prefer.”
Charlotte lowered her head and dipped her tongue into the cantharide-spiked wine with the delicacy of a kitten. It took her a few licks to develop an effective technique, but before long, she’d learned to curl her tongue so as to lap it up more efficiently. There was something crudely titillating about the sight of this golden-haired countess hunkering over her meal with her face in the bowl, hands dutifully clasped behind her, a steel knob emerging from her whip-scarred ass.
“Pick up the napkin,” he said when she’d eaten enough to suit him.
She started to unclasp her hands.
“Uh-uh-uh,” he said.
She paused, then lifted the napkin with her teeth.
“Stand and come to me.”
She rose with admirable grace and came to stand before him, back arched, hands behind her, the napkin still clutched in her teeth.
He took it and used it to dab her mouth, wiping off that absurd lip rouge in the process, then tossed it onto the tray.
“Step back,” he said, “under the lantern. Let me get a good look at you.”
She did as she was told.
“Turn ’round,” he told her. “Slowly.”
Charlotte had the fragile beauty of a porcelain figurine, exquisitely pale but for her nipples and vulva, which were blood-flushed from the cantharides. Her body was elegantly proportioned, her skin smooth and flawless—save for a few barely visible little silvery streaks on her lower belly, which Darius would never have noticed but for the bright overhead light.
“You have children?” he asked.
“I’m barren.”
Pointing to the evidence that her belly had once been greatly stretched, he said, “These marks testify otherwise. You’ve given birth.”
She frowned at the marks as she composed her response. “Just…just once,” she said. “I became barren afterward.”
“When?” he asked. “When did you give birth, I mean.”
Charlotte took her time answering, and when she did, it was with obvious reluctance. “Nine years ago.” She evidently didn’t care for this line of conversation, didn’t like being reminded that she was the mother of a young child by the man who’d been fucking her and whipping her and shoving things up her ass.
“A son or a daughter?”
“A son,” she said stiffly, looking straight ahead, but not at him.
“A son and heir—that must have made the late Lord Somerhurst happy. And how does a wanton widow dispose of an inconvenient nine-year-old earl while she’s off lifting her skirts for the Hellfires? Pack him off to some suitable boarding school where he can learn to be a proper peer of the realm, I should think.”
She didn’t answer, merely continued staring beyond him.
“You lied to me,” he said. “When I first asked if you had children, you said you were barren.”
“But it’s true, I am—”
“You deliberately misled me. I see no substantive difference between that and an outright lie.”
She sighed.
“’Tis of little import why you lied,” he said. “I won’t have it. You must be taught a lesson, one that will sting.”
She met his gaze then.
“Come.” He gestured for her to follow him to the bay that housed the rack. The massive table was bordered with a framework of iron and fitted out with three wooden rollers about eight or ten inches in diameter, one at either end and one in the middle, connected by a pair of ropes that wound around all three rollers. Darius ordered Charlotte to climb onto the device and lie down. This she managed rather awkwardly on her own; he was in no humor to offer any help.
Seeing that she’d situated herself with the small of her back curved over the middle roller, he repositioned her so that the roller lay beneath her hips with the knob of the pear just accessible in case he should choose to employ it. He lifted her arms up and out so as to lash her wrists to the top roller by means of noose-like loops at the ends of the two ropes; yanking her feet apart, he secured them in like manner to the bottom.
As he touched her, a tableau materialized in his mind’s eye of a woman being tortured on the rack by men in masks and robes. To many women, such an image would summon feelings of repulsion and terror—but not to Charlotte Somerhurst. He felt her fascination with the notion of being tied up and stretched, tormented, penetrated, and her excitement that she was about to experience such treatment firsthand.
It vexed him that Charlotte’s penalty for that insolent lie should be something she secretly craved. Never mind that everything that had transpired between them this evening was rooted in her baffling desire for punishment. The things he’d done to her, the things he’d made her do—they were all, essentially, at the behest of her dark, unspoken longings. Nevertheless, the more immersed Darius became in the role she’d prescribed for him, the more he felt like—the more he became like—the disdainful, vicious, easily roused persecutor she wanted him to be.
On each end of the middle roller was an iron winch with holes all around in lieu of handles; a long, iron-tipped pole meant to operate the winch leaned against the wall nearby. Darius jammed the tip of the pole into the winch and hauled it toward him, using both hands and putting his weight into it, for the machinery was very old and very heavy. The middle roller rotated with a grinding creak, drawing the ropes, and Charlotte’s arms and legs, somewhat ti
ghter. He cranked the winch several more times, until she was stretched out with her hips raised high by the middle roller, drawing Darius’s gaze to her upthrust sex. It was, if anything, even pinker than before, the slit glistening with moisture.
“You’re enjoying this a bit too much.” He shoved the pole back into the winch. With each successive crank, the ropes grew more taut, exerting that much more pressure on Charlotte’s limbs.
“No more,” she gasped. “Please.”
Darius whipped the cravat from around his neck and balled it up. “One would think you’d have learned to keep your mouth shut by now.” Prying open her mouth, he stuffed the wad of silk into it.
Thus gagged, the only sounds she could produce were muffled whimpers. She tried to capture his gaze as he reached once again for the pole, her expression one of silent pleading. Ignoring her, he gave the winch one final turn, just to remind her that it was he who wielded the power here, he who had the right to dispense pleasure or pain at his sole discretion.
Crossing to the shelves near the bed, Darius chose a pair of petite thumbscrews and brought them back. Maliciously ingenious little devices, they were comprised of two strips of iron joined by screws, the interior surfaces, which were meant to crush thumbs or other small body parts, studded to enhance their effectiveness. Charlotte lifted her head—the only part of her that she could move even slightly—to watch him pinch and pull her right nipple to full stiffness and fit the little instrument over it. He tightened the screws to squeeze the plates together, stopping when she winced. He did the same to the left, then twisted and tugged both thumbscrews until she moaned through her gag.
Was it pleasure that had produced that moan, or pain? So confounded was Darius by his role in this strange drama that he didn’t know which he most hoped to elicit anymore.
Parting her sex lips, he slid a finger into her tight little puss, hot juices running like sap down his hand. She shuddered in obvious pleasure. Whatever discomfort Charlotte might be enduring, she was clearly in a state of excruciating arousal—only heightened, no doubt, by the suffering to which he was subjecting her.
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