As Julia sat up amongst the cushions she saw Jahngir lounging on a couch facing the two girls. Their sensual loveliness and his obvious interest caused her a twinge of envy, immediately forgotten when he beckoned her and pointed to the cushions at his feet. A tingle of excitement ran over her skin as she knelt and he placed a hand on her shoulder and rubbed his thumb on the nape of her neck. A second later the other girls finished tuning their instruments and began to play.
Though the music sounded slightly discordant to Julia, she caught the soft beat of the little drum Helai was tapping. Immediately she was reminded of the nightclub and the two almost naked dancers she had watched wheeling and whirling their oiled bodies in the lights of the stage. Laila and Reshmina began to dance. Their skins also bore the sheen of oil and their bodies moved with the same graceful precision that had so fascinated Julia the first time she had seen it. The girls’ hips snaked and swayed in time with the music. The chains hanging from their nipples swung to and fro to the same cadence as the music, catching the sunlight as they turned this way and that with an elegance Julia could only admire and wish she could emulate.
As the tune speeded up so did the steps of the dance, and the girls’
movements became more abandoned. As she had in the nightclub, Julia felt the earthy, primitive sensuality they exuded as they postured and spun, thrusting out their hips and breasts, wriggling their buttocks or rising on tiptoe and revealing the finely delineated muscles of their brown-skinned calves and thighs. Her pulse quickened. There was something very appealing about it all that made her long to have the skill to do it herself.
It ended too soon as far as Julia was concerned, with a final loud tap of Helai’s drum and the two girls falling to their knees before their lord with their breasts lifted high by their arching backs and their thighs parting wide as they pulled aside their tiny strips of silk to reveal what lay gleaming and bare beneath them.
“You enjoyed that, I think,” Jahngir said to Julia after he had congratulated everyone on their performance.
“Yes, Master.” Her breathing, quickened by her excitement at the dance, did not slow as his thumb again stroked the back of her neck. “I wish I could dance like that.” A pang of guilt and embarrassment accompanied her admission.
“Do you? Well, it may be your master will allow you to be taught, if you please him.”
She looked up at him uncertainly, half-hoping and half-afraid that he would confirm her suspicion. “Please, who is to be my master?”
Chapter 3
Jahngir Khan smiled. “All in good time, little murgah. Whoever it is, you must have the skills to satisfy him. You must concentrate on learning them first.”
Half relieved and half disappointed, Julia dared not press the matter. He did not speak to her again before the evening meal arrived, brought to the door by one of the kitchen girls. No one but the concubines and their lord were permitted to enter the zenana. Jahngir left soon after they had eaten.
The girls played backgammon and asked Julia if she knew any card games. When she described some they had not heard of, they insisted she teach them how to play. Except for its exotic location, her evening passed in much the same way it might have at home. But, of course, when the time came to go to bed it would be nothing like the same.
Julia became more and more restless. She felt nervous but also a sense of anticipation, which reawakened her shame and guilt and drove her tangled emotions into turmoil once again. Her nerves were already strung tight by the time the Pathan returned. He sat with the girls, discussing their music and dancing while the minutes dragged by and Julia’s pulse went faster and faster. She was almost glad when he rose and conducted her to her sleeping cubicle – almost, but not quite. Her stomach was turning somersaults as she lay on her mattress and he sat on its edge and laid a hand on the front of her thigh. Julia stiffened.
Jahngir chuckled softly. “I almost forgot. You have not yet been chained.” He made no move to do it. Quickly she raised her arms above her head in the hope he would secure her wrists, but he just smiled down at her. “You have very full lips,” he said. “They are very inviting.” Her mouth opened in a gasp as he leaned down, and then he was kissing her longer and harder than he had before, one hand toying with the fullness of her breast. Julia’s eyes closed of their own volition and her lips moved on his without her willing it. He tugged the lower one with both of his.
“Full and very sweet.”
Breathless, she stared up into his dark, simmering eyes. It was all she could do to stop her arms going around him and crushing him to her hard-nippled breasts. He trailed a finger between them and down her stomach to the little swells below it. Her hands sought the manacles on the wall and closed tightly around the two steel rings.
Jahngir laughed softly. “Very well, if it makes you happy.” He fastened the cuffs around her wrists.
At once she felt better. Paradoxically, it seemed that there was something liberating about being restrained. It freed Julia from her conscience. She no longer had to feel responsible when the Pathan’s fingers stroked the fleshy bump that had risen where her thighs met and tickled it until it swelled into a bud. She only had to enjoy it.
Like the dancing, it stopped too soon. With a soft sigh of frustration she opened her eyes. Jahngir stood up, the evidence of his own arousal tenting the front of his robe. It slipped from the silken folds, only inches from her face as he leaned forward and unfastened the shackle on Julia’s right wrist. Without conscious thought she ran her fingers over its velvety length.
He stepped back, smiling and shaking his head. “You’ve done enough for one day. Rest. Tomorrow we begin again.”
Stunned by what she had done Julia jerked her hand away, suddenly aware of the significance of it being free.
“So you can do more than just watch if you want to.” And with that he was gone.
Julia’s cheeks flamed. He knew she had been spying on him. He had deliberately chosen the cubicle next to hers when he had made love to the other girls, planned it to ensure she became ever more enmeshed in the lustful ways of the zenana. And it had worked. She remembered the feel of him filling her mouth. How could serving him thus have had such an effect on her? It was not as if it had filled her…. She shied from the thought and realized it had been the wrong image to conjure in her mind as she felt a long, delicious ripple of excitement.
Long before the lights went out Julia had assuaged her overwhelming need with her free hand as quietly as she could. By the time the room went dark and familiar, excited sounds began coming from the next cubicle, she was lying with the warm, comforting glow of her climax’s aftermath in her belly. Oddly, she felt calm and clear-headed after her fulfilment, her earlier confusion dispelled and her thoughts distinct.
She had begun by fearing Jahngir Khan, hating him for wanting to enslave her, and for the humiliation of his assaults and degrading punishments. She still resented him and was still afraid but she could not deny, however much she would have liked to, that she found him far more attractive than was good for her. There was no ignoring his masculinity and masterful presence, or how they affected her. Julia shivered. How on earth could she admit she was attracted to a man, even to herself? It was completely out of character.
A low, impassioned moan came from close by. Reshmina was with him. Julia had heard the girl speaking to him in her native tongue minutes earlier. She turned her back on the glow of lamplight shining through the pierced screen separating her from them. A strange and unfamiliar feeling filled her but she knew what it was. For the first time in her life, Julia was jealous.
*
Jahngir Khan woke Julia early. Though it was light, the sun was still hidden behind the eastern mountains as he led her to the bathhouse.
Once again she found herself alone with him, both of them bared and immersed to the thighs in water. Without needing to be told, Julia began sponging his broad-shouldered figure, acutely sensitive to the heavy sway of her breasts and how their points k
ept brushing his skin. She was aware too of the big, brown-skinned length hanging between his thighs and that it was unlikely to remain that way for long. To her embarrassment but not her surprise, her sex quivered. She was surprised by the question Jahngir asked.
“Why did you come to India?”
Haltingly, Julia explained that she had needed a job and had replied to Mrs. Winter’s newspaper advert for a lady’s travelling companion. “It was only at the interview I discovered I was expected to travel all the way to India.”
“Yet you have travelled here, ill-prepared though I think you were for such a journey. You’ve never done anything like it before, have you?”
Julia shook her head.
“You don’t seem the type who is eager to visit distant lands,”
Jahngir said.
She had told herself that a hundred times but felt a twinge of resentment when the Pathan said it.
“I wasn’t enthusiastic about going to England to study,” he continued, “but my father insisted I do it. Was it perhaps your parents who persuaded you?”
“Oh, no! Quite the opposite.” Though in a way he was right. “I came to get away from them,” Julia admitted.
“You do not honour your parents?” His eyebrow arched in surprise, but it was the rising and thickening of his manhood that seized Julia’s attention.
“Of course I do,” she said thickly. “It… it’s complicated.”
He sat on the bath steps, heedless of his effect on her. “Explain.”
She dragged her gaze from his groin. “It was the Wall Street Crash. Have you heard of it?”
“The whole world has heard of it. Even in our remote little corner we were not entirely unaffected. Your parents suffered?”
“My father’s business failed. He got another job, but he and my mother can’t forget what they had before. For two years I’ve had to listen to them harking back to how things used to be. Then they somehow came up with the idea that I could get them back everything they had lost.”
“You? That hardly seems likely.”
Julia’s cheeks heated with a blush. “I know I’m not clever or educated like you but I don’t think I’m completely stupid.” Her sharp retort surprised her and from the look on his face, Jahngir Khan as well.
He smiled. “So there is a spark in you, little murgah. I thought one so passionate could not be without at least a little fire. And I do not think you stupid. Continue.”
“They wanted me to find a rich husband.” Julia sighed. “They even made a list of possible candidates. I tried to tell them I didn’t want to do it but they never take any notice of what I say. They never have.
They couldn’t understand that everyone could see very well what they were doing and we were becoming a laughing stock. It was getting more and more embarrassing. God knows I wasn’t very confident before they started parading me around like a prize cow.” She stopped, out of breath and wishing she had not told him any of it.
“Families can make things difficult at times,” he said with a thin smile and she remembered his own experience. “But arranged marriages are common in India and hardly unheard of in England.”
“But I don’t want to marry for money. It’s obscene and degrading to be traded off so my parents can have things back the way they used to be. I felt as if I was being sold into slavery.” She gulped. That was exactly the fate that awaited her.
Jahngir smiled thinly. “Then it seems you have fared no better by coming here, but also no worse. Tell me, do you always run away from what frightens you? Have you never tried confronting your fears? You ran from your parents just as you have run from me. Yet you could have stood up to them and refused to cooperate in their plan.”
“You don’t know my parents,” Julia said. “My father said he had had me flogged once and he could do it again if I defied him. So I made my arrangements with Mrs. Winter in secret and came here.” She had thought herself very bold at the time but what he had said was true. If she had had the real courage to simply pack her bags and leave instead of sneaking out in the dead of night, she might not be naked in his bath right now.
“I believe I met many people like your parents when I was in your country,” Jahngir said, “and their daughters - determined, ambitious girls very interested in wealth. Have you never had any ambitions?”
“To love and be loved,” Julia answered at once. Not that she ever expected to have it fulfilled when all the men she met only wanted to stare at her breasts. And why was she revealing it to him when she had never told a living soul before? She realized she had never thought about any sort of life but the one she had been brought up to expect – marriage, husband, children. That was what English girls did, after all, although Kate did not seem to believe it. “I always expected to become some man’s wife,” she ended lamely.
“As long as you got to choose him yourself, eh?” Jahngir took her hand and drew her down beside him. “Well, now you must learn to be some man’s concubine, and you need to practice.”
Julia winced. He had not pulled that punch, but her pussy prickled when she looked again at his groin.
“Kiss me first. That is a skill you need also.” His arm snaked out and pulled her close and she trembled as his warm body pressed against hers. Her mouth seemed to find his without her being aware of it. It moved moistly on his lips of its own accord, parted, drew gently upon them and then more eagerly. Hard flesh pressed against her belly. His tongue pushing into her mouth was only a momentary surprise before she responded in kind. She rubbed herself against him, feeling the strength in his hard muscles, his vigour and potency. His hand smoothed down her back and cupped her bottom, leaving her skin tingling where it had touched. Julia sighed against his lips as his hand slid down the cleft in her buttocks and stroked the pout of her intimate opening. Her breasts seemed to swell and felt achingly tender. A wonderful warmth filled her head as well as her pussy.
Her mouth still captured by his, she found herself rolled onto her back on the hard stone steps. The discomfort of his weight coming down on her meant nothing as she quivered excitedly. He was going to put it inside, Julia thought with a great rush of excitement. She was going to feel the power of that marvellous shaft filling her. Arousal made her wriggle wildly. She was ready. There was nothing she wanted more.
Her head spun.
Her mew of disappointment as his lips abandoned hers changed to a groan of pleasure when they traced a tingling trail of delight down her neck and breast to one stiff, pulsing nipple. He drew the hard point into his mouth, flicking it with his tongue and drawing on it until it ached.
Julia ran her hands over his body, revelling in the feel of his warmth and strength. The faint voice of conscience was swamped by her surging excitement as Jahngir’s fingers slowly stroked their way up the insides of her trembling thighs towards the moistly eager core of her femininity.
His mouth found hers again, and this time it seemed natural that his tongue should thrust between her lips at the same moment his fingers pushed between her prickling petals and sent ecstatic shivers coursing within. She clasped him tighter, rubbing herself against his thickened flesh.
“Yes, oh yes,” Julia panted as his lips kissed their way to her breast once more. She was slick with dew and trembling in anticipation and desire. She rocked her hips and drew her legs wider apart. Jahngir’s rigidity slid over the sensitive skin of her thigh and she felt it nudging her quivering nether-lips as his fingers withdrew.
“Master,” Julia moaned breathily and knew she meant it. Her eyes opened and stared up into his. A dark, glittering flame of desire seemed to fill their depths. “Yes, Master,” Julia gasped, lifting, offering herself and feeling his pressure between her thighs increase until she ached with her need.
With a harsh growl, Jahngir Khan pulled himself from her embrace and got to his feet. “Are you trying to bewitch me girl? First you play the timorous virgin and now suddenly you’re a temptress.” He strode to the bench. “You will come here and serv
e me as I desire. Do you think it is for a slave girl to dictate to her master what is done to her? Here, I say, and on your knees.”
Fearful, confused and more disappointed than she would ever have believed, Julia crawled to him on all fours. Though his cock remained very upright, the smouldering desire she had seen in Jahngir’s eyes had turned to flashing anger and she could not understand why. His mood had changed in a heartbeat. She had been so sure he meant to make love to her as avidly as she had seem him do with the other girls. What had happened to steal her moment away? What had she done to anger him, when all she wanted was to make him pleased with her? Her belly flipped as she realized just how eager she had been, how much she really had wanted to please him, but now was not the time to ask herself why.
Jahngir’s anger was warning enough of that. It left her in no doubt that she would be punished if she did not perform well, and this time there would be no last-minute reprieve.
Yet despite her puzzlement and regret, Julia continued to feel the ripples of her arousal and her longing still held her in its grip. With a hand that shook only a little, she obeyed Jahngir’s order to once more pleasure him with her mouth.
*
Courtney moved Penny into the wide shaft of sunlight slanting through the arched windows in the wall of the high-ceilinged room.
“Stay there. You will not move,” he ordered.
The nervous flutter in her stomach increased as he disappeared through the double doors ahead of her. The native guard there closed them behind the Englishman, and with what Penny interpreted as deliberate insolence ran his lascivious eyes over her. She felt very alone and frighteningly vulnerable. Beneath the lightweight, white cotton of her dress she wore nothing, and with the sun shining down on her she knew the dark points on her breasts were visible through the thin material, along with the red weals Courtney had carved across her skin.
Kate and Julia: Slave Girls of the Raj Page 5