Ben hopped over to the bush and gave them an investigative swipe.
“No. Going nice and stiff, though. Those jeans’ll be a treat to put back on.”
“So, what shall we play next? Game of I Spy?”
He sat back down beside her and put his arm around her waist.
“Do you promise you’ll think about my birthday?”
“I promise.”
Chapter Twelve
The rehearsal was going well, but Lydia’s concentration wasn’t at its best. Unusually for her, she was wearing a dress, a shortish number with a flippy skirt, and she found the air on her bare legs distracting. But not quite as distracting as trying to keep her knees pressed together while she played.
Because Lydia was not wearing any knickers.
In the week since she had accompanied von Ritter back to his hotel room, he had taken up the habit of setting her little tasks for each day. Although he had professed to want to take things slowly, Lydia felt that she was in the middle of some kind of sensual waltz, being whirled around the dance floor until her head spun.
She had gone to an equestrian tack shop the day before and bought a riding crop, with which von Ritter had promised to whip her on the backs of her thighs if she didn’t practice her violin playing to his satisfaction. Buying the item had been embarrassing, because she’d been sure the assistant had known that it would never be used on a horse, but it had thrilled her all the same.
And now she faced the prospect of going back to von Ritter’s hotel room and being tested on her violin playing. She hoped she wouldn’t be found wanting. Or did she?
They still hadn’t had full sex, von Ritter limiting their physical contact deliberately so that Lydia felt her frustrations climb higher day by day. He would touch her, sometimes gently, sometimes roughly, but he would always stop before she reached orgasm. In fact, he had forbidden orgasms until their first night together, and Lydia had obeyed the command, although it would have been very easy to cheat, lying in her bed at home. But she didn’t want to cheat. She was too curious to know where this odyssey of sexual exploration might take her, and the excitement of being under von Ritter’s spell was drawing her further and further along the road.
If she wasn’t mistaken, their first night together might well be tonight.
She smiled to herself as she bowed away, then her eyes slid over to where Milan sat, waiting for his solo.
He was being difficult, of course. Well, when was he not?
Earlier in the week, he had confronted her about her relationship with von Ritter. She had not seen the point of denying it, so he had spread the story far and wide until the orchestra and all of the trustees knew about it. There was no rule about fraternisation of members, though, so nobody was particularly put out.
Most were amused, Lydia’s reputation as an unlikely femme fatale being something of an orchestra joke. Milan’s tactic had backfired, merely highlighting him as the jealous ex-lover who had lost.
Vanessa was supportive of the relationship, approving of the impeccable von Ritter.
“He’s the kind of man you should have gone for in the first place,” she said. “A safe pair of hands, bit of a father figure. I know there are the rumours about his temper but I haven’t seen anything to justify them. Have you?”
“No. He did admit to it himself, though.”
“Did he?”
“Yes, but he said he’d never hit a woman.” She paused. “In anger.”
Vanessa gave her a searching look.
“You mean he’d hit a woman without being angry?”
“Well, I don’t know if hit is the right word.”
“What is?”
Lydia was blushing furiously by now, wishing she’d never taken this tack.
“I don’t know…” she said. “Change the subject.”
“No, I don’t want to. You’re bright red, Lyds. This is a sex thing, isn’t it? He’s kinky, isn’t he? I knew it.”
“Just a bit,” she muttered.
“Jeez, Lydia, are you allergic to vanilla or something? First a bisexual polyamorist and now a sadist. You know how to pick ‘em.”
Lydia burst into mortified giggles.
“He’s not a sadist, really,” she said. “He just likes to take control.”
“Yeah, we’ve noticed. Does he spank you on the bottom with his baton?”
“Shut up!”
“Okay, okay. The subject is closed. For now. But I might need to ask you some more later. Purely for information, of course. I need to take my mind off my own sex life.”
“Oh. Everything’s okay between you and Ben, isn’t it?”
“More than okay. Wonderful. Amazing. But he wants me to meet his parents.”
“Oh, Ness, that’s brilliant. He’s really serious about you.”
“I’m terrified.”
“They’ll love you. You’re so good for each other—they’ll see that, surely.”
“I hope so. I really, really hope so.”
Lydia put down her bow, the piece being finished and the rehearsal brought to a close. Could she get out of here without getting nabbed by Milan? She stuffed her violin rather clumsily back into its case and stood carefully, making sure the skirt of her dress had fallen to mid-thigh before removing her hand from its hem. Underneath it, she was wet, and had been since her journey to work. There was something about going knickerless that just seemed so very, very rude, even if nobody knew about it.
“Lydia.” Milan’s voice behind her. “Come for a drink with me and Sarah.”
Fat chance, sunshine.
So he was playing Mr Nice Guy now, was he? Let’s all be friends and cosy up together?
“Got to dash—need the loo,” she said, heading for the double doors at a rapid pace.
She stood in the stall for a good ten minutes, giving Milan ample time to round up his usual suspects and bear them off to the Delius Arms. While she stood there, she lifted her skirt and looked down at her bare pubic triangle. An earlier challenge of the week had been to get a full wax down there. The skin was so smooth and her lips stood out, puffy and pink. If only von Ritter would come into the bathroom now, drag her up against the wall and slam himself into her, over and over and over… She thought about touching herself, but no. She was meeting von Ritter, and he would know.
She stepped out of the stall, washed her hands even though she hadn’t used the toilet and pouted at herself in the mirror. Then she set off for the hotel.
Von Ritter was ahead of her, waiting at the bar. He waved her over, smiling, and invited her to sit down on the high bar stool—a precarious place for a knickerless girl to be.
“Did you do as you were told?” he said, looking down at where her hem grazed the upper slopes of her thighs, which were pressed tightly together.
“Yes,” she whispered, glancing over at the barman to make sure he wasn’t listening.
“And how was it?”
“Different. Bad for concentration. I was too busy keeping my legs together to think about anything else.”
“That’s good. I wanted it to focus you on your cunt.”
She looked sharply at the barman again, then at von Ritter, frowning as if to shush him. But von Ritter wasn’t a man to be shushed.
“I wanted you to be constantly thinking about how wet you are, how your clit feels, how you want to be touched down there. You do want to be touched down there, don’t you?”
Lydia could barely get her voice out of her constricted throat. She nodded instead.
“Good. Shall we go?”
She slid off the bar stool, her heart thumping, desperate to get to the bedroom for some much-needed relief. But he put his hand on her arm, checking her progress towards the staircase.
“Oh, no. No. We aren’t going upstairs yet. It’s a very fine evening. I thought we could take a walk in the park.”
“Karl-Heinz,” she pleaded, but he was not to be dissuaded.
Out again into the balmy air they stepped, Lydia fee
ling every swish of the fine cotton-jersey skirt against her skin. The park was busy with post-work strollers and students, tourists and lovers. Karl-Heinz put a hand on her bottom as they walked along the path, rubbing it through the thin fabric.
“This is a public place,” she hissed.
“I know,” he said, unfazed. “I’m not doing anything illegal. What?”
She thought she might burst into flames. Her clit was throbbing with need and her upper thighs were damp. Couldn’t they just go back to the hotel…?
He patted her bottom and led her away from the path until he found a tree with a trunk of sufficient width to conceal them from the majority of passers-by.
He pinned her to the trunk and began kissing her passionately. As his tongue foraged in her mouth, he lifted her skirt until her bare bum pressed against the bark. Forgetting now her earlier worries about this being a public place, she prayed for him to push his fingers inside her soaked slit, but he wouldn’t. Instead, she tried to grind herself against him, lifting a leg to open herself up, rubbing her calf against his perfectly pressed trousers.
“Mmm,” he said, breaking off. “You need it badly, don’t you?”
Lydia wondered how he could sound so calm when she was so ruffled.
“Can we go to the hotel now? Please?”
“Just a moment. Turn around.”
She faced the tree trunk while he held up her skirt and inspected her bottom, running his fingers around the bark grooves that patterned her flesh.
“You are showing the whole park your bare bum,” he said, giving each cheek a light smack. “Bad girl.”
“Nobody can see, can they?” she asked anxiously.
“No, no,” he reassured her, lowering the skirt and pulling her back towards the path. “At least, I don’t think they did.”
Back in the hotel room at last, von Ritter prolonged Lydia’s agony by making her play a number of violin exercises, naked, in the centre of the room while he sat in the armchair watching.
“Yes, that’s good,” he said when she had finished. “But not perfect. Come and bend over the end of the bed, please.”
How many more hoops would she have to jump through before she got her orgasm? It was a slightly grumpy Lydia who presented her upthrust bottom to her conductor.
“You were good, so I’ll only give you six,” he decreed, retrieving the riding crop from the wardrobe. “But they will hurt. Count them.”
The leather end of the crop slapped down with a tremendous crack. He had hardly had to put any effort into the stroke, and yet it lit Lydia’s bottom up with fiery effectiveness.
“Ouch! One,” she said.
He laid each stroke with consummate skill, never hitting the same area twice, so that by the sixth her entire bottom felt as if it had been covered. The strokes were heavy and burned deep into her flesh. She put her hands behind her to feel the heat. It was a satisfying glow. But her pussy still throbbed, longing for attention.
“Okay,” said von Ritter softly. “I have made you wait long enough. Do you want to come now?”
“Oh, yes—please, Sir,” she blurted. She wanted his cock, thick and long, moving back and forth inside her.
But he didn’t even take off his jacket.
Instead, he made her lie on the bed on her back with her legs spread in the air, displaying her red bottom and her swollen clit while he took a vibrator from the bedside drawer then knelt on the bed beside her.
“You will stay in that position,” he commanded. She held on to the backs of her knees and waited while he tested the batteries and the speed settings.
Finally, he switched it on and applied the tip to her nipples, one by one, letting the buzz ripple through her while she bit her inner cheek to keep from begging him to fuck her with it.
He moved it slowly down her stomach, then dipped it in and out of her labia, sometimes holding it there for a few seconds, sometimes just giving her the briefest of contact. She struggled to hold her legs in position, wanting to kick them or thump her heels down on the mattress—anything to bring her closer to the humming source of pleasure.
“Was it hard?” he asked, holding the vibrator a maddening inch from her clit. “To go without orgasms for a week?”
“Yes,” she whined. “Really, really hard.”
“Were you thinking all the time of sex?”
“All the time. During rehearsals, even.”
He tutted. “Bad. You must focus during rehearsals. You must think of the music, not of your greedy little pussy.”
“I couldn’t help it.”
“And you are sure you didn’t…give yourself a little helping hand? When I wasn’t looking, maybe?”
“Honestly, I didn’t. I wanted to wait. I didn’t want to disappoint you.”
“But would you have disappointed yourself?”
Somewhere in the midst of her brain cell-destroying lust, Lydia found a part of her that was capable of considering this question. Yes, that was the crux of it. She would have disappointed herself. All of this was an exhilarating challenge, and she was ever a people-pleaser, a teacher’s pet, a top-of-the-class student.
“Yes. I hate to fail.”
“I see that in you,” he mused. “Well, a lot of us are like that. Most of us, probably. It’s what makes us work so well together.”
“Please…” He was drifting off topic and, meanwhile, that vibrator was going nowhere.
He chuckled. “Sorry. You need attention, don’t you?”
She nodded, her face screwed up with the effort of not grabbing the damn thing from his hand and using it on herself.
He lowered it again, circling her clit so that she squirmed furiously on her bottom, then he plunged it, suddenly and without warning, inside her.
She yelped, feeling the silicone tip breach her opening, which yielded immediately, thirsting for penetration. Von Ritter fed it inside with agonising slowness, pushing it inch by inch, stopping multiple times to twist it in circles. Lydia was surprised at how easy it was to accommodate. But for the vibrations, she might barely have even felt it.
Once it was fully inside her, though, von Ritter deployed a little attachment—a butterfly clitoral stimulator—and suddenly her entire being was whitewashed out of existence by an orgasm that seemed to last forever. Even when it seemed to die away, it would revive again, the butterfly coaxing her clit to further heights, until the spasms were way beyond her control. Von Ritter held the vibrator fully inside her for the duration, occasionally thrusting with it, keeping her clit covered and her cunt stretched until her limbs collapsed, quivering, on the bed.
“I think a little abstinence has done you good,” he whispered, removing the vibrator, leaning over her with a tight smile. “That was quite an orgasm.”
She wasn’t capable of an answer, though she wondered fuzzily if he had enjoyed it at all. He seemed satisfied with a job well done, but she couldn’t locate any joy in his expression.
Now will he fuck me? she wondered vaguely, but it seemed not.
He tucked her into the bed and went to shower.
She was asleep before he came out.
* * * *
A knocking at the door woke her up.
Disorientated, she looked around for signs of von Ritter, but he didn’t seem to be there. She looked around for something that would tell her what the time was, but her watch was buried somewhere underneath her clothes.
Where was he? Who was at the door?
“Karl-Heinz,” she called uncertainly.
“Room service,” said a voice from beyond the door.
She dragged herself out of bed and found a bathrobe hanging up, which she slipped on. She opened the door a fraction to find a uniformed young man with a tea trolley. Now she came to think of it, she was famished.
“Oh. Thanks,” she said, opening the door for him to wheel in the provisions. For an awkward moment, she thought of spy thrillers in which room service always turned out to be bad news, delivered by enemy agents.
&
nbsp; Don’t be daft. You aren’t a spy.
“Herr von Ritter ordered it for you,” the man explained. “He said to tell you he had to go out but he will be back soon. He asks that you will wait for him.”
“Oh. Okay. Thank you.”
She nodded at the man, hoping that would be enough to get rid of him. From the corner of her eye, she could see the vibrator on the nightstand and she prickled with embarrassed heat.
He left, thank goodness, and she sat down to a feast of seafood pasta and chilled sauvignon blanc, wondering where von Ritter was and when he would be back. She felt anonymous and lonely here in the hotel room, like a whore who’d been hired for the night.
Was that what she was? A diversion? A toy? Von Ritter never seemed to want to talk about himself much. She had no sense that she was getting close to him. It was all sex games so far.
She speared a prawn and shrugged inwardly.
So what? It was early days. She was having fun. And it definitely took her mind off Milan.
Damn. Why did I have to think of him?
Now she was going to lose her appetite and sit there, thinking about him and what might have been. Double damn.
Her inconvenient longings were conveniently interrupted by the arrival of von Ritter.
“Where did you go?” she asked.
“Julius called.”
“Julius Hackmeyer?”
“That’s right. I joined him for a quick drink. I’d have brought you along but…” He chuckled. “You were far too deeply asleep.”
“You could have woken me.”
Von Ritter shook his head. “I think he wanted a man-to-man talk, Liebchen.”
“Oh?”
“Curious, aren’t we?” He tweaked her nose and stole a clam from her dish. “Aren’t you hungry?”
“Oh…a bit.”
“I hope so. Because I’ve got something I want to give you for dessert.”
Chapter Thirteen
The spring rushed headlong into a sultry summer. The city air grew hazy, the hemlines rose, the concert drew closer.
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