The other guard behind her would be looking at the streaked purple bruising on her caned buttocks, she was sure. Doubtless it was what Courtney intended.
Penny longed for a cigarette, but he had denied her her handbag as well as her underwear for the five-minute walk up the town’s steep main street from the British Residency to the palace of the Prince of Jargahal.
She had no idea why she was there. Courtney had told her if she wanted to see the girls again she would do as she was told. The threat had been enough to make her acquiesce, just as it had been when he had used it to bring her to his bed on both of the previous nights. And what nights they had been! Never before had Penny experienced so extraordinary a mixture of pain and pleasure, of maddening frustration, outright humiliation and fierce, relentless arousal as she had in the forty eight hours that had passed since the first cruel kiss of Courtney’s cane had lashed across her backside.
The man she had once thought of only as an ageing eccentric had warned her he would be demanding, but Penny had not been prepared for the trials he had put her through on her first night. From the moment he had made her clamber onto his wide bed and place a slim, steel collar fixed by a chain to the wall around her own slender neck she had known she was completely at his mercy. And he had shown her none. Nothing she had done, from posing to display her breasts and buttocks and even greater intimacies to him, to the way she had followed his orders to give him pleasure, had been good enough.
Courtney’s response had been to flog her with a thin, plaited-leather whip and make her repeat every action until she satisfied him.
Every bee-sting bite of the lash had added to the pain and throbbing the whippings and canings he had given Penny that same afternoon were already causing. It should have been unmitigated torment. Yet, he had shown he was skilled at more than just plying the whip. In between the floggings and the demeaning demands, the touch of his long-fingered hands had fired her passions and brought Penny to the boil again and again. For all her shame and smarting hurts, her body had wriggled and her head had whirled with the flaring intensity of her desire. She had felt such pleasure before, but never repeated over and over again with barely a pause.
Only when the first paleness of pre-dawn had tinted the sky beyond the open-shuttered windows had Courtney finally taken her. The memory of the mind-swirling climax she had experienced beneath him was enough to bring a prickle of excitement to her belly and a blush to her cheeks. As she had slumped, exhausted, onto the bed and drifted towards welcome oblivion she had had to acknowledge the man was a master of his art.
Nor had her degradation ended there. At Courtney’s insistence and under his supervision, the moment Penny had awoken in the early evening of the next day, Ranee and another Indian slave girl had bathed the stiffness from her body in a deep, square bath big enough to hold all three of them. Already embarrassed by them touching her most intimate places, the Englishwoman had then been forced to submit to the two girls massaging a salve into her welts and throbbing bruises. Only grudgingly had she admitted it helped relieve the awful pain.
It had been hard to face Ranee with even a vestige of dignity after the way Penny had whimpered and wriggled under her lapping tongue and probing fingers while she has been chained in Courtney’s punishment room. Never before had she submitted to the unnatural attentions of one of her own sex. That she had surrendered to her passion the instant she had felt the girl’s touch made the incident doubly humiliating to recall.
Yet now it seemed insignificant compared to what she had suffered on her second night in Courtney’s hands.
He had hardly touched her himself except to bind her on her knees to the foot of his bed. Despite her unwillingness, it had been his slave girls who had aroused her, much to Penny’s shame. They had taken turns. While Courtney used one, the other had explored Penny’s bound nakedness with hands and lips and tongue, pinching, teasing, nibbling and licking at every inch of her and continually driving her to the verge of fulfilment. Each time, a hairsbreadth away, she had heard Courtney’s curt order to stop and the maddening teasing had vanished and left Penny groaning in an agony of frustration.
It had gone on for hours, made worse by the sights and sounds of the man using his slaves, filling them in every way imaginable, much to Penny’s shock and embarrassment. To hear the girls’ pleasured moans and cries as they climaxed and to smell their ripe woman-scent mingling with her own had almost had her screaming from the urgency of her need.
Finally, as Penny was sure her tormentor had intended, she had lost all self-control and begged to be allowed her own release. The price had been high, and not only for her. First, Courtney had caned both of his slave girls across the buttocks while they crouched on all fours on the bed. To Penny’s discomfiture they had taken their punishment with much more fortitude and far fewer cries than she had managed. She knew that was one reason they had been beaten in her presence. The other had clearly been to stimulate Courtney before he made her serve him.
“You’ll pleasure me exactly as I tell you if you want to come,” he had told her. Penny had not hesitated. The knowledge that the two native girls were watching had meant nothing compared to the raging demands of her passion. Penny had knelt before him and licked and lapped and nibbled and finally accepted his bitter seed, though she had struggled to keep it down when it reached her stomach. Only then had he freed her right hand. Desperately, Penny had dived her half-numb fingers between her madly twitching thighs, and seconds later her lower belly had roiled ecstatically with a profound and protracted climax. Wincing though she had been at the bright-eyed stares of Courtney and the girls watching every writhe and wriggle, she could not remember when anything had ever felt so wonderful.
Recalling it was enough to send a tremor through her just as the door opened. Courtney raised a beckoning finger. Cursing her thoughtlessness at taking a deep breath that strained the thin material of her dress against her breasts and increased the guard’s leer, Penny stepped forward.
With her stomach performing somersaults, she heard the door close behind her and barely noticed her luxurious surroundings as all of her attention was seized by a man sitting in the big, leather armchair on the opposite side of the room. Or rather, not all of it, for it was not the sight of the man that made her catch her breath and her eyes go wide. It was the nearly naked Indian girl kneeling on the floor at his right, and more especially the equally scantily clad white girl at his left.
“Your Excellency, this is Mrs. Penelope Winter.” Courtney’s hand in the small of her back propelled Penny towards the seated man.
“Penelope, I present His Excellency Sahar Gul, Wazir of His Highness the Prince of Jargahal.”
They could only be slave girls. The thought repeated continually in her head as she struggled to focus on the wazir.
“H… how do you do, Your Excellency,” Penny stammered. Why in heaven’s name had Courtney brought her here? What possible business could this man have with her? The nagging discomfort in her bruised buttocks increased as they clenched nervously, and Penny fought the urge to stare at the slender, white slave whose hair was the same light-brown shade as her own.
Sahar Gul did not greet her. Leaning back in the deep armchair he moved his gaze slowly up from the cream, high-heeled shoes Courtney had made her wear to the blush she could feel staining her cheeks. Self-conscious under his silent scrutiny, Penny lowered her eyes and heard him snort a laugh.
“Better,” he said in almost accentless English. “It is customary for women to bow before they address me, but I am not surprised by her discourtesy. I see she has the usual challenge in her eyes so common among her kind. The mem-sahibs are all so convinced of their own superiority.” He stood up, and Penny would have backed away but for the continued presence of Courtney’s hand on her back. It was hard, insistent, controlling. She swallowed. The wazir’s comments had been addressed to him, not her.
The Englishman chuckled. “I believe she is not quite so certain of it as she was
a day or two ago, Excellency. You will see why if you care to remove her dress.”
With a very audible gasp Penny turned her head to stare in fearful astonishment at Courtney’s face. “But….” He’s a damned native, she wanted to say, a heathen tribesman hiding behind a thin veneer of civilisation. The white man could not possibly mean to expose her to such a barbarian. Sahar Gul smiled coldly as she looked anxiously into his face.
“It appears she is not enthusiastic about your suggestion, Courtney Saaquib.”
The Englishman’s hand slid slowly down the aching curve of Penny’s bottom. “She will warm to it when she understands I have explained to you her wish and that she needs your permission to carry it out, Excellency.”
Penny gasped again as realisation struck her like a slap in the face.
“Then she can remove her dress herself,” the wazir said evenly.
Courtney moved to stand beside him and she saw his face bore the same harsh, uncompromising expression as Sahar Gul’s. “Do it, Penelope,” he said quietly.
Mouth dry, Penny looked at the curious stares of the kneeling slave girls and did not move. Courtney was telling her to strip naked in front of them and some heathen Pathan. Did he imagine she had no pride, no dignity or self-respect? Did he really think she had sunk so low that she would reveal her nakedness to a crude, coarse native just because he told her to? Yet, her whole future depended on the return of Julia and Kate and getting them to Dhokat on time. All her past trials and humiliations would have been for nothing if she refused now. Penny steeled herself.
Her head stopped spinning. The blur at the edges of her vision cleared and she saw the menace in the Englishman’s steady stare. Slowly, she reached her shaking hands to the top button of her dress.
“Let it fall,” Courtney instructed when she had unfastened the last one.
Belly leaping, Penny allowed the dress to slide from her shoulders and drop to the floor.
“You have whipped her,” Sahar Gul observed, frighteningly casual, and Penny lowered her eyes from his appraisal of her nudity. “Is she disobedient?”
“Disrespectful and conceited,” Courtney replied, and grinned at the indignant snort she gave.
The wazir went behind her, and she jerked violently as his hand closed over her buttocks and her discomfort flared into pain.
“Stand still,” he barked. “Put your hands on your hips and get your feet wider apart.”
Pulse racing and gut churning, she obeyed and felt a sudden excitement mingle with her fear at his stern, inflexible command. Oh, heavens! It was happening again.
“It is the way of the mem-sahibs,” Sahar said, appearing in front of her and eyeing the rapid rise and fall of her breasts. “They are haughty and proud, and their arrogance makes them slow to obey. I find I punish my white slaves much more often than the others. Yasmeena, show them.”
The white girl rose from her knees and turned to display the angry red welts on her taut, narrow buttocks that told of a recent beating. He had changed her name, Penny realized. Would that happen to Kate and Julia too?
“She has been mine for over a year,” the wazir continued, “and still I must give her a dozen regularly to remind her that her pride has no place here.” He laughed as he tweaked the up-tilted point of one of her small, pointed breasts. “But I will admit she pleases me greatly.”
Penny thought she saw a glint of what might have been pride in the girl’s eyes at that moment, and a small smile on her lips that became a grimace of pain as she obeyed the order to kneel once more. Was it possible the girl had been pleased by his words? Penny was given no time to wonder about it.
“She has good big tits.”
She flinched as Sahar weighed them in his hands, but with the warning of the girl’s red-striped bottom fresh in her mind she did not pull away. Two brown-skinned thumbs rubbed her worryingly stiff nipples and she felt a frightening twitch of anticipation between her legs. The wazir gave her teats a very firm squeeze and looked disappointed.
“A pity she’s not in milk. Look at me.”
Puzzled by his odd remark, Penny was slow to obey. A shiver ran through her as the pressure of his fingers under her chin lifted her eyes to his. The dark, glittering lust she saw set her quivering again and made her gulp.
“Does she perform well?”
“She’s adequate,” Courtney allowed. “Untrained, of course, but quite responsive providing your expectations aren’t too high. Remember, she’s not schooled like a slave girl.”
“Precisely why she interests me.” Sahar gestured at the girl he called Yasmeena. “White slaves I have, but a free white woman, a true mem-sahib like the arrogant, immodest ones who treat me so patronisingly at their dinners and cocktail parties – that excites my curiosity.” He began unbuttoning his chapaan.
Penny’s heart leapt. Excites was the right word, she realized, as she saw the big bulge in the front of his trousers. At once she raised her eyes, only to find herself looking again into the blatant desire in his own.
A curl of fear and excitement made her belly contract at the same moment as a tingling ripple tickled between her thighs. He was a native, a voice screamed in her head, but her brain could not even control her thoughts, let alone her feelings. Sahar Gul was not old, she found herself musing, certainly much younger than Courtney. His hair was cut in the European way and his brown, clean-shaven face was quite handsome, and he was tall and broad-shouldered too. He was strong, she acknowledged, and not just physically, for he governed the Princedom of Jargahal for its titular ruler. If he could control all of that he would have no difficulty controlling her. Penny’s horror at the thought did not prevent it from feeling deliciously wicked and intensely stimulating. What was it about such men that their casually cruel and offhanded treatment seemed to attract rather than repel her? What had come over her that she became excited by no longer being the user but the one being used? It defied all logic and common sense, as well as her ability to understand it. And it did not matter at all when her blood was pounding through her veins and the warmth of her arousal was tingling low in her belly.
“I confess, Courtney, that I was surprised when you told me a mem-sahib was anxious to visit the slavers in the mountains. It is much more usual for a beautiful white woman to keep as far away from them as possible.”
With almost hypnotic fascination, Penny watched Sahar unbutton his trousers as he spoke. Her breath escaped in a rush when the last one came free and his thick manhood sprang into the open.
“She is either very brave or very foolish,” he said.
“Or perhaps only very desperate,” Courtney chuckled.
“Or perhaps all three.” Sahar took a step that poked his erection into Penny’s stomach. It seemed as hard, implacable and demanding as the look he was giving her. “On your knees, white woman.”
He was a native. He should not be giving her orders as if she was one of his slaves. And she should not be obeying them. Fear, abhorrence, shame and excitement were all sending shivers through her.
Stunned, Penny felt herself sink to her knees, her conscious will powerless against the need – Oh, Lord, the desire! – to do whatever he told her to. Her belly felt hollow but her excitement was raging, a craving beyond her control. She stared at the thick flesh rearing up before her.
“You know what to do,” he said flatly.
Chapter 4
They were all watching, Penny thought. They would see every intimate movement of her lips and tongue – Courtney, the white girl and the Indian one, and Sahar Gul himself, looming over her, arrogant and imperious. She raised her eyes to his and the curling, cringing humiliation of what he was forcing her to do made her blood pump faster and the tremors quicken within her. It was happening again, she thought desperately, but desire far outweighed despair, and if she refused she would lose everything and she would be whipped again. Taking a deep breath, she parted her lips.
The wazir pushed his fingers into the thick waves of her hair, gripping her s
kull and thrusting himself vigorously into her open mouth.
Penny wanted to reach down and chafe her trembling sex but it was difficult with Sahar’s big baton plunging so fast and half-choking her each time it jabbed into the back of her throat. Her eyes watered, and she gagged around the hardness between her lips. Yet, she dared do nothing but let it happen and, to her utter shame, wish it was her pussy he was using so roughly.
His hand tightened in her hair, forcing her head back and tilting her face up. He pulled from her mouth and she saw his hand begin pumping furiously and reflexively shut her eyes. A heartbeat later something splattered wetly into Penny’s face. She tried to twist in his grip but could not escape the thick, viscous fluid spraying over forehead, nose and cheek as he huffed and grunted his way through his climax. Breathing hard through her nose, Penny kept her lips clamped as the warm goo flowed slowly down her face towards them. She had never even allowed a white man to do such a thing to her before.
“Here, Yasmeena,” she heard the wazir order, and opened her eyes a crack to see the English slave kneel before her. Penny would have shied away, but Sahar Gul’s controlling hand still gripped her and she had no choice but to submit as the girl scooped some of the slimy fluid from her cheek with a finger.
“Open,” the wazir barked.
Penny’s stomach lurched in horror. She had thought she had at least escaped having her mouth filled. As Yasmeena held the slimy stuff under her nose the Englishwoman reluctantly accepted she had been sadly mistaken. Avoiding the searching look in the girl’s eyes she opened her mouth and let the white slave drip the fluid onto her tongue. It tasted just as sour and foul as Courtney’s did.
Yasmeena scraped every drop from Penny’s face and fed it to her, while the wazir continued holding her head and she cringed inside and half-choked on the puddle collecting in her throat.
Kate and Julia: Slave Girls of the Raj Page 6