by Maren Smith
“What’s a furry?”
“Someone who likes to pretend they’re an anthropomorphized real or fantasy creature, and sometimes both. It’s all very strange. And there! Did you see what I just did?” Selena gave herself a light slap on the lips. “Shame on me. I’m a Little who has married the Daddy of my dreams and who, in less than twelve hours, will cement myself to him in ceremony dedicated to dominance and submission. Who am I to pass judgment on someone else’s sexuality?”
It was a rhetorical question if ever she’d heard one, but Chelsea couldn’t help herself. “Human?” she guessed, looking back at Selena over her shoulder.
Selena smiled. “You know, I had a feeling about you right from the very start. I just knew we were destined to be the best of friends.” She threw her arms around Chelsea from behind, giving her a loud kiss on the check. It was the strangest feeling: being half naked and hugged like this by a woman she barely knew. And yet, not only did they feel like the best of friends, but it felt like they had been for years.
* * * * *
The designated skinny-dipping pond was actually quite secluded. Feeling every bit like the runaway slave she was dressed to be, Chelsea followed Selena through the Castle, out a back door, across two gardens, past horse stables filled with human “ponies,” across a wide field hip-high in golden grass, and into the woods beyond. They wandered in a wide-arching circle from the back of the Castle, all the way around to the far left where they climbed a three-rung wooden fence and finally ended up at a massive koi-fish pond just behind the hedge maze.
“I think I see my room from here,” Chelsea said, looking up at the frolicking statues. That was a very buxom woman wearing the strap-on.
“We had to go the long way around,” Selena laughed back, already bending down to wrestle off her knee-high sandals. “I wanted to make sure no one was following us.” She grinned, wrinkling her nose. “If they want to find us tonight, they’re going to have to work at it.”
“They?” Chelsea jumped when she heard the snap of a not-so-distant twig.
“The guys,” Selena said, shielding her eyes from the lights of the garden to better see out into the night. She breathed another soft laugh at the sound of feminine giggling coming from beyond the fence. “I told everyone, starting with Kade, so they’re sure to find us eventually.” She threw a wink back at Chelsea, and then waved as the women of the Castle emerged from the darkness—Kaylee, the diminutive Hannah, a woman Chelsea didn’t yet know, and even the newly-pregnant Sara, who was smiling, but sporting dark circles under her eyes. She looked thin, too thin, and tired. But, at least she was smiling. Obviously, a little mischievous relaxation was something she needed.
Maybe it was something Chelsea needed too.
They were all dressed the same, white slave outfits and sandals that laced to the knee, and together they ran the gamut from blonde to brunette. Chelsea wasn’t the only redhead, but she was the tallest by at least four inches and she felt every inch the gangly clumsy teenager amongst these four elegant ladies.
They were taking off their sandals.
“Come on,” Selena laughed at her. “You can’t go swimming dressed like that.”
“But you said you told everyone. Aren’t you afraid we’ll get caught?”
“I wouldn’t call it fear,” the other redhead, Sinclair, said as she shucked out of her clothes, giving them a toss onto the grassy bank of the pond. “It’s more like acute anticipation.”
“Getting caught is the whole point,” Kaylee told her, stripping out of her own now as well. It was like high school gym class all over again. She’d been too tall, too skinny, and too awkward then, too. And good Lord, they were all beautiful. Kaylee was flippin’ gorgeous. So was Sara, if one didn’t look too closely at her burns. Sinclair was the plumpest, but what little extra weight she carried fit her frame, rounding out all her curves in all the right ways. And then there was Hannah, scarred in strange places, albeit nowhere near as bad as Sara, and with the most perfect grapefruit-sized breasts that Chelsea had ever seen. Compared to them, Chelsea was an ugly duckling among swans.
“Oh my God, the water’s cold!” Hannah gasped as she lowered herself to sit on the grassy edge and dangle her feet into the water.
“Where are the steps?” Sinclair circled the water’s edge. “I can never find them in the dark.”
“They do that on purpose, you know,” Kaylee laughed. “It makes it so much easier for them to catch us if we’re still fumbling to get out of the pond.”
“You do this on purpose, knowing you’ll get in trouble?” Chelsea asked incredulously.
“Aw, it’s the only fun they get,” Sinclair said, dipping her foot in the water. “They work too hard. Sometimes they forget they get to have fun here too. I’ve found the stairs, by the way.”
The other ladies gravitated around to her side of the pond, but Chelsea hesitated.
“Coming?” Selena asked, and reluctantly Chelsea lowered herself to sit in the grass and remove her sandals.
“So this is a game?” she asked, not so much dawdling now as trying to understand. “You like getting caught?”
“It’s a good kind of trouble,” Kaylee said, while Hannah and Sinclair exchanged quick grins. “The kind that makes your heart flutter and your insides melt, if you know what I mean.”
Actually, Chelsea didn’t, but as she sat watching the ladies submerge, gasping and laughing in the chilly water, she found herself thinking about Kade.
Tongue deep…
She shivered, and she wasn’t even in the water yet.
Squealing softly, Selena slid down off the steps, submerging right up to her shoulders. “Oh, that hits right in the nethers!”
Even Chelsea laughed at that, and when she did, Selena gave a push and swam to her side of the koi pond. Folding her arms over the grassy lip, she grinned. “Are you still coming to my commitment ceremony tomorrow?”
Hugging her knees to her chest, more content to watch than swim, Chelsea nodded. “Sure.”
“Are you still going to be my bridesmaid?”
She barked a soft laugh.
Selena flashed her teeth in a grin. “We are practically sisters, after all.”
“How long have you been friends?” Kaylee asked, lowering herself to sit on the steps. She dipped her legs in the water, gradually getting used to the cold.
“Ages and ages.” Selena threw Chelsea a wink.
Shaking her head, Chelsea was about to tell her she was crazy, that they were practically strangers, but that’s when they heard the first sharp snap of a stick out in the darkness beyond the dimly lit garden pond.
As one, the women froze, heads turning to the sound. They all listened, including Chelsea, who quickly scrambled to stand. A thin veil of excitement quickly grew up around them, but all she could hear and feel was her own quickening heartbeat.
“Was that them?” she whispered.
From out of the night came a man’s laughing sing-song reply, “Here, kitty-kitty-kitty. Daddy wants his sweetness.”
In a burst of splashing and laughing, Sinclair dove for the stairs. “They’ve found us!”
“Run!” Kaylee shrieked, and suddenly a volley of bright garden lights snapped on, lighting up the pond, the maze, a pair of romantically-involved statues that Chelsea hadn’t even known were there, and all the lawn of the surrounding grounds.
Chelsea nearly fell into the pond when a shadow dashed past her. Jackson didn’t even bother taking his shoes off. He leapt fully dressed into the water, coming up with a mighty splash and a roar with his arms thrown around Sara. He plucked her neatly off the underwater steps and rolled them both playfully back under water. They came up again sputtering and laughing seconds later, with Sara shrieking in mock dismay as his hand came smacking down twice across her wet bottom. Her legs were wrapped around his waist by the time he heaved them both up onto the grassy bank.
“Hello, beautiful,” the brawny security guard told her, wrapping his hand in her long
blonde hair and pulling her head back to trail his nipping kisses down the exposed line of her throat.
Chelsea stared, frozen in surprise until Kaylee dashed by her, grabbing at her arm.
“Run,” she said again, laughing. “I guarantee, honey, he’s brought someone for you too.”
That startled Chelsea back to life. “What? Who?” She grabbed her sandals up off the grass, but there wasn’t time to stop and put them on. “I don’t need anybody!”
“Oh, but he would never overlook a chance to pleasure a guest.” Kaylee gave her arm a squeeze. Her gaze darted past Chelsea’s shoulder. “Run!”
“For all the good that will do you,” Master Marshall drawled, as he came striding out of the darkness. “Run as fast as you can, for as long as you can. But you, my love—” He pointed at Kaylee, those devil-blue eyes of his seeming much darker and fairly glittering in the brightness of the garden lights. “—you are already caught, and I will have my prize.”
Chelsea and Kaylee bolted in opposite directions. Heading for the maze, Chelsea could have got away but she couldn’t help glancing back instead. She hesitated. It was a giddy sight playing out behind her. The redheaded Sinclair, dripping wet, her slave’s garment in her hands, was grabbed up from behind. She and the leather-clad man who caught her twirled together before he heaved her up onto his shoulder. He laughed, slapping her bottom while she shrieked and kicked, doing everything except breaking free as he carted her off into deeper shadows.
Kaylee barely made it to the edge of the tall grass before Master Marshall tackled her. He took her stomach-down to the ground, pinning her hands up high behind her back. Tearing at the fastenings of his pants, he kneed her legs apart. Whatever he whispered was for her ears alone, and it must have been wonderful because Kaylee was moaning, arching her hips back to rub against him in response.
Jackson was ripping open a condom packet with his teeth, his pants already sagging down far enough to bare the muscular swells of his ass. From this vantage, she couldn’t distinguish the length of hard flesh he dressed that condom over, but Sara was urging him on, her fingers and her heels both digging into his buttocks, trying to hasten him along.
Chelsea had no idea where Hannah had gone, but she could hear vegetation crashing out in the field and there was a longhaired man in hot pursuit.
Selena was the only one not running. Floating on her back as if without a care in the world, she offered playful splashes and beckoning smiles to the tall, lean man standing at the water’s edge. Kicking off his shoes, he pulled his shirt off over his head and unzipped his trousers.
“It’s bad luck to see the bride before the wedding,” she teased.
“Luck, schmuck,” he said, stripping out of his trousers. He never even noticed Chelsea and didn’t seem to care at all who might catch sight of his extremely prominent erection.
Chelsea covered her mouth, her wide gaze darting from one couple to the next until a softly whistled ‘yoo-hoo’ caught her attention. Two men—twins, identical in appearance from the black of their boots all the way up to the way they parted their short dusty blond hair—stood on the other side of the pond from where she hovered uncertainly. They were staring right at her, both with the same hungry intensity.
Even knowing she was the only woman left, Chelsea actually looked behind her. There was no one there, just the giant outer wall of the hedge maze blocking her way back to the safety of the Castle.
“What do you think, Trevor?” one brother asked his twin.
“I think I’d like to find out if she tastes half as good as she looks. What about you, Travis?”
The first brother smiled. “I’ll bet she cums twice as hard for me as she will for you.”
“Quality matters more than quantity, isn’t that right, honey?” As if on cue, the brothers divided, circling opposite sides of the pond and coming right for her.
Chelsea didn’t realize she had backed up until she felt the prickling stab of the hedge bushes pushing back at her. Her breath caught, but it wasn’t fear she felt churning at her insides. It was excitement. Strange, knot-tightening excitement that made her knees go weak and her heart pound as if it were about to explode inside her.
“I’ll bet she hollers my name first,” Trever grinned as they sauntered towards her.
“I’ll bet you she can’t remember any name, including her own, by the time we’re done with her,” his twin replied.
Kaylee was moaning constantly now. So was Sara, her arms and legs both wrapped around Jackson as he moved in slow undulations over her. Someone was getting spanked in the field, and in the pond, Selena and her lover were nothing but two heads floating above the water as they shared soft kisses. And Travis and Trevor were still coming toward her, rapidly closing the distance.
Her heart panicked; her belly thrilled.
Travis beckoned. “Come to Daddy, beautiful. I’m going to make you feel so good.”
Chelsea was almost tempted. Her stomach spasmed, tensing so tight and hard. Her palms were sweating. Her breasts ached to feel him make that promise a reality, and all around her a veritable orgy unlike anything she had ever before witnessed continued to unfold.
Run, Kaylee had told her.
Dropping her sandals, Chelsea did exactly that.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Chelsea didn’t go around the maze, she went right through it. The branches were sharp and dense, but when she dropped to crawl, they thinned out enough for her to wiggle right through. For once, her height was not a detriment. Thin as she was, she was under, up and running again before the brothers reached the outer wall of the maze. One dropped to crawl through after her. He squeezed, but the breadth of his shoulders made that both painful and difficult, and he swore. The other laughed, dashing right to follow the wall around.
“Where’s the entrance, Trav?” he called back.
“All the way around! Go, go!”
Chelsea ran, following the twisting path when it was easy and dropping to scramble under the maze walls when dead ends sprang up to block her. She actually heard it when one brother ran past the wall she crawled under. She could hear the other crashing into a dead end somewhere in the distance behind her.
“Sweetheart,” one called out in the night. He was laughing, but warning weighed heavy in his tone. “Your bottom is going to match your hair when I catch up with you. And I will catch up, that I promise you!”
A slow shiver trembled through her, tightening her in ways both scary and delicious. She should be afraid right now; any sane woman would be. She was being pursued by two men—strangers who thought she was a part of the BDSM community that occupied every inch of this resort and who, when they caught her…if they caught her…and damn if a part of her didn’t hope they would…would act on that assumption, and yet that didn’t frighten her anywhere near as much as the excitement spurring her to keep running.
“Allez allez come-in-free…” Travis (or was it Trevor) crooned, prodding his way through the maze behind her. “Where are you, darling?”
Dropping to the ground, she crawled under the next wall, the last hedge as it turned out. A wide stretch of lawn rolled out across the well-lit grounds, past three different sets of fornicating statues to an even wider stretch of Castle wall with an alcove very similar to the nursery playground. If she ran in the shadows, she might just make it all the way there without Travis or Trevor spotting her.
“Those have got to be the prettiest damn ankles I’ve ever seen.”
Chelsea bolted, crawling through the prickly wall with the skim of strong fingers only just missing her shins, then ankles from behind. She got out from under the hedge just as a shadow came running around the far corner of the maze.
So much for not being spotted.
She’d never run harder or faster in her life. Without looking back, she raced for the alcove with her heart pounding so fiercely it made her chest and her head both hurt, and hovered breathlessly on the verge of laughing the entire way. She heard one of the twins sho
uting behind her, calling to his brother, the cry of a hunter in pursuit, but he was far behind her. Far enough, anyway. If she could reach the alcove…if she could find a place to hide…
The alcove was blocked by a fence, but when she hit the gate it flew open and she dashed inside. Only two garden lamps lit the darkness here and both were up near the Castle entrance. The entire back half of the garden was blanketed in darkness, but not so much that she couldn’t tell the path from the grass or the bushes from the trees and bricks of the Castle.
It wasn’t empty, either. Three men surrounded a mostly (if not completely, it was too dark to tell) naked woman bent into waist-high stocks. With her head and hands immobilized, it didn’t take much imagination to figure out what the men were doing. Now and then, she thought she saw camera flashes. The only door to the Castle was located at the top of the second-floor stairs and was blocked by the shadow of a man, who was sitting on the topmost step, enjoying leisurely puffs on his e-cigarette while he watched the scene below unfold.
She was never going to reach that door before the brothers reached the courtyard, and without the maze to slow them down, they were going to catch her.
Abruptly, Chelsea switched destinations, practically diving headfirst to get into the perimeter bushes. She crouched in the shadows with the cold bricks of the Castle at her back, and wondered what in the world she was going to do now. If she was lucky, maybe the brothers would head straight for that door, giving her a chance to dash back out of the alcove and into the garden without being seen. If she wasn’t lucky, however…if they chose instead to search the area…
The captive woman in the stocks was moaning now, those faint noises of intensifying pleasure accompanied by the wet, slick slapping sounds of sex. Of the skinny-dipping party, Chelsea could hear nothing more at all. But, of her pursuers…
Chelsea cupped both hands across her mouth when the leafy branches to her left suddenly jerked and jostled and a black-clad shadow ducked into the space beside her. She recognized his scent first—the spice of that godly cologne mingling with the fresh scent of cinnamon from his vapor cigarette; it made that stab of lust deep inside her flutter wildly.