She was horrified.
Chastened, once again, she nodded.
She led the way into the en suite bathroom.
“I left the bag hanging from the shower curtain rod,” he said.
She pointed. “It’s in that drawer.”
“You can run,” he said.
“Shut up, Thomas.”
He grinned. “Master gave you permission to start with half a bag?”
“Yes. Aren’t I lucky?”
“Actually, yes. And you’ll consider yourself lucky later. Otherwise he might make you take two litres, then stuff a butt plug in behind it.”
Her jaw actually fell.
“Serious,” he assured her. “Dead serious.” He pulled out the bag. “After filling it, hang it from someplace high.”
“Like the shower rack. Where it was.”
“You are a bright one.”
She stuck her tongue out at him.
At home, she’d be hot for him, way hot for him. But here, she was off balance. Naked to his natty dressing. Short to his powerful physique. Sub to…servant? Regardless, he ranked higher on the totem pole than she did.
He turned on the faucet. “Since you’re administering your own, you can choose your own water temperature. Master could always choose to send two litres of piping hot water into your bowels. Or he could make it drip with ice.”
Nice.
“Always make sure you’ve turned off the spigot.” He showed her. “If I were giving it to you—”
“That doesn’t gross you out?”
“Do you mean, would I find it repulsive?”
“Yeah, in English speak.”
“No. It’s part of being prepared for Master’s penetration.”
“But… The… Err…”
“Elimination?”
“Yes. That.”
“You can have no secrets, Alana.”
“If I hear that one more time, I’ll, I’ll…”
“Go on.”
“Shove it up your tight ass.”
“Want to?”
“What?”
“I don’t have the same issues with enemas as you do. If it makes you happy to give me one, I’ll bend over and take one right now.”
She felt as if she’d been dropped into an alternate universe. She shook her head. She so didn’t want to play around up any man’s rear end. “You’re serious.”
“I am.”
“No way.”
“He’s right, though. You can’t be a full sub and keep secrets. No parts of you are private from your Master, not your thoughts or your bowels.”
“Shut up. Just shut up.”
“Alana, as they say in the States, get over yourself.”
She really was going to hurt someone.
“As I was saying, if I were giving it to you, I’d have you on your knees, with your head on the floor. When you’re doing your own, that’s the fastest way, as well, but you can have trouble reaching the spigot to turn it on and off.”
She nodded.
“So you may want to sit on the toilet and lean forward. Or lie on the floor, on your side. That’s actually the most comfortable.”
“As if that’s possible.”
He laughed. “I didn’t say it was comfortable, just the most comfortable.” He grabbed a tube of lube from the same drawer where she’d earlier stashed the bag. “A final hint. Put a dab on the end of the nozzle. And if you can stand it, you should first insert a finger up your own arse to make the insertion a bit easier.”
He smiled. “I’ll leave you to it, then.”
“Good-bye,” she told him.
“Unless…”
“Out!” She’d drown in her mortification alone.
She shut the bathroom door behind him. Not that it would keep him or Ethan out if either of them wanted in.
Chapter Seven
Master Ethan always, always, kept her off-balance.
She’d returned downstairs to find Thomas waiting for her. “Master would like to see you in the breakfast room.”
“Which is…?”
He indicated another room she hadn’t yet been in.
Ethan was at the table, eating eggs and a rasher of bacon. No carbs for him.
He looked particularly handsome this morning. He wore a crisp black T-shirt, exposing the sinew in his arms. His hair was still damp from his shower, and a hint of spice clung to his skin. He was appealing and powerful in one hunk of a package. She wanted him. She’d had a taste of his cock last night, and she wanted more. She wanted him inside her, filling her, stretching her, making her cry out, making her weak, making her come.
But, other than fingering her pussy after he beat her, he hadn’t gone near her. That, she hoped, would change soon.
“Something to eat?” he invited.
“Toast. With strawberry jam.” And a side of chocolate. Unlike him, she could happily live off a diet of carbs. If they came from sugar, so much the better. “And more coffee.” He served her some toast from a rack. She could have easily reached it herself. Naughty, she supposed, but if he was going to offer…
He then rang a bell, and a woman appeared.
Alana couldn’t have been more stunned. She’d thought she was alone in the house with just the two men. But now, with a woman there, especially one so young and gorgeous, Alana felt a little uncertain, as if she were standing on shifting sand. The woman had short, dark, spiky hair. On anyone else, the style might have looked butch. But on her, it looked hot.
She looked as if she’d be more at home in a London club or on South Beach. Her jeans had a fashionable slice cut across one thigh, and her T-shirt fit tightly, stretching across her breasts. Her right ear had half a dozen studs running up the side, and she had a tat of a half moon on her forearm. Alana was doubly aware of being naked. And she was uncomfortable with it.
“Celia, the princess would like some coffee,” he told the woman.
The woman gave a quick nod, and she didn’t give Alana more than a cursory glance as she headed out the door.
“No trouble sitting after your beating?”
“My right buttock is a little tender.”
“Let me see.” He folded the morning newspaper that he’d been reading and laid it alongside his plate. He didn’t repeat himself, he simply waited for her obedience.
She hesitated only a few seconds. Pushing back from the table, she stood. Dutifully, she bent.
“Are you able to reach your ankles?”
“Yes.” Without prompting, she grabbed her ankles and held them.
He ran his fingers over both of her bottom cheeks. “You’re not bruised.”
“Coffee, sir.”
At the sound of the other woman’s voice, Alana started to stand. “Stay where you are, sub.”
This was, by far, the most difficult thing he’d compelled her to do.
It was one thing to be naked in front of the men, but to be bent over, exposing her slit to another woman? She’d never even been to a female doctor. She felt the blood rush to her cheeks, and her humiliation was complete.
It took the woman five minutes longer than forever to cross to the buffet and put the pot in place.
“Shall I pour, sir?”
“Please,” he said.
Bastard.
He was intentionally prolonging her torture.
“Cream and sugar, princess?”
Were they really having a conversation with her bottom up, in the breakfast room? The entire situation was becoming too much to bear. Still, he waited, and she finally answered. After all, being indignant was one thing. Being indignant without coffee was another. “Both, Master.”
“Will that be all, sir?” the servant asked.
“What do you think of our lovely sub?”
Alana gnawed on her lower lip and forced herself to breathe deeply. She couldn’t believe he was discussing her as if she wasn’t there, as if she were… As if she were a slave.
“She seems well behaved, sir.”
“Anything you’d like to do to her?”
“Oh, yes, sir. I’d like to lick her cunt.”
Alana prayed the floor would open and swallow her whole.
“Perhaps we can arrange that. Alana?”
Her hips jerked at his words. Never. Never, ever, ever. “If it pleases you, Master.”
From her upside down position, she could see Celia leave the room. Ethan slapped Alana gently on her sore buttock. She yelped.
“Very well done. You may be seated.”
She shook her head to clear it as she rejoined him at the table. “You wouldn’t…”
He sipped from his tea. “I wouldn’t?”
“I mean…”
“Why wouldn’t I allow someone to give you a fantastic orgasm?”
“But another woman?”
“So it would be okay if I let Thomas eat you out?”
She blushed at his crassness.
“Drink your coffee, Alana.”
He was clearly moving on from the conversation, but she couldn’t let it go. Over and over, as she ate the toast and drank coffee, she couldn’t think of anything but Celia between her legs. The idea upset her. It intrigued her. And she couldn’t help but remember yesterday, when he said perhaps he’d have another woman beat her.
He hadn’t mentioned anything a second time, but he dropped hints and then allowed the conversation to be changed.
And she didn’t know him well enough yet to know which things he was serious about, and what he might require of her.
Oh yes, he was a master of the psychological pieces of BDSM.
He knew when to push, when to back off.
He moved aside his plate and took out her letter again. “You keep a lot of secrets, Alana.”
“Not intentionally,” she said quietly.
“You give me your body, but only the parts you want to give. And you refuse to share your thoughts, your emotions.”
“I’m here,” she said, “for the experience.”
“And you’re denying yourself exactly that.”
She sat back in her chair, but she continued to meet his gaze, rather than look away.
“You travelled across an ocean to be here. You badgered me for months to accept you into my training. I’ve never seen anyone try as hard as you to get accepted. And now that you are… No one has fought me harder than you.” He picked up his tea. The cup looked ridiculously small in large, powerful hands. “Even subs who were sent to me by their masters didn’t fight me as much as you do.
“There’s a method to my training,” he continued. “It’s deliberate. It’s carefully calculated to break down a sub’s resistance.”
“Maybe I’m untrainable?”
“That’s up to you. If you want to fight, you’ll fight. If you want to keep secrets, you’ll keep secrets. But every time you fight, with every secret you keep, you prevent yourself from the full experience that you say you want.” He leaned towards her. “But soon, Alana, you’ll need to make a decision. I won’t continue to fight you. And you fight yourself more than you fight me. The letter, for example. You took nothing off the table when there are clearly things that terrify you, that upset you, that you’d rather not try. You were dishonest with me. And more disturbing, you were dishonest with yourself.”
She lowered her gaze, looking at her toast and jam.
“Part of your training, as we talked about, is the practice of breathing, of grace and elegance. If you focus on those things, rather than focusing on how you hate an experience, you’ll get the benefit of its full effect.
“That doesn’t mean you just gamely jump into every situation. It means you’re honest with yourself and with me. When you react negatively to something, you think about what it is that made you react that way. And you tell me why. No prevarication.”
“You want…”
“All of you. I want your submission, mental, physical, and emotional.”
She swallowed.
“But as always, Alana, it’s your choice. I cannot take what you won’t give.”
Her shoulders slumped.
“Think about why you’re here,” he encouraged. “You either want it all, or you don’t. If you don’t, take the rest of your vacation in London or go back home. Find a Dom to play with who is in your comfort zone. Someone who won’t push your boundaries, someone who doesn’t want to explore the psychological implications, someone who will let you hide. But make no mistakes…that man is not me.”
With that, he reached for the cane that was resting on the floor beside him. He left the room without another word to her.
She sat there, coffee ignored, toast untouched.
She felt miserable, alone with her thoughts. He wasn’t a stupid man, he’d left her intentionally.
She had come here by choice. Hell, she’d spent months trying to wheedle her way into his life. But what she got out of the experience was up to her.
Eventually, Thomas joined her. “You’re good for him. You’re a challenge he doesn’t quiet know what to do with.”
“I think I’ll get sent home.”
“You might. But in the meantime… You have exercises.”
“Exercises?”
“That whole way you got up from the kneeling bench yesterday? Won’t do.”
“And?”
“We’ll practice about two hundred times today.”
“Two hundred?”
“Maybe more.”
He led the way to the drawing room.
“I need to use the restroom first.” Teach her not to drink so much coffee.
He led her to a bathroom down the hall. When she went to close the door, he put his foot between it and the jamb.
“You’re kidding me.”
“No.”
Remembering what Ethan had said, she merely sighed.
She supposed she should be grateful he hadn’t followed her inside the small powder room.
Minutes later, she emerged. Thomas was standing there, shoulders propped against the wall. Another experience she hadn’t wanted, but had survived.
Did it get easier?
She entered the drawing room.
“Start with the kneeling pad down,” Thomas told her. “And practice getting up from there. Fifty to start.”
The first ten were dismal.
The next ten were worse.
“Slow down,” he instructed. “You’re not a horse getting out the gate. You’re a sub who wants to please her Dom. Think about what you’re doing. Think about showing off your body to its best advantage.”
After the next twenty, her knees hurt and her legs were becoming wobbly. But Thomas didn’t relent. “Ten more.”
Because she was fatigued, she did slow down. She really concentrated, making every motion count.
“Much better.”
Ethan.
She resisted the impulse to turn around.
“Remain kneeling,” he told her.
She hated having her back to him, unable to see his face.
“Tell me about nipple clamps,” he said. “You marked that you were nervous, but might like to try.”
Her mouth dried. Being with him, and with Thomas, was a constant assault. Ethan had meant it when he said he would push her boundaries. And she knew she didn’t have the option of trying to dodge his question. “My nipples are very sensitive,” she said. As if he didn’t know that. “I’m afraid the sensation will be too much. I’m afraid it will hurt.”
“It will.”
At his blunt, raw words, she moistened.
“There are many different types of clamps, from mild to extreme. I’m not very much interested in the mild type, unless we’re out in public, and I just want you mildly aware you’ve been clamped. For the most part, they’re part of training. They can be used for punishment. They can be used to heighten sexual arousal.
“The sideboard has a pair in the drawer. Fetch them.”
Gracefully, or as gracefully as she could now that her legs were tired, she rose.
She crossed to the sideboard and slid open the drawer. A pair of vicious-looking metal clamps, joined together by a stout, linked chain lay there on the velvet covered bottom.
If it was possible, her nipples seemed to shrink and retract.
She turned towards him, and she saw she was alone with him. He was focused completely on her.
Slowly, she crossed the room, the floor cold on her bare feet.
Remembering what he told her yesterday, she knelt and offered the clamps to him.
“Legs even farther apart,” he instructed. “I may want to play with your pussy, and I always want it available.”
“I want you to.”
He raised a brow.
“I want you to play with my pussy,” she said. “I want to be fucked by you.”
“In due time.”
“Why?”
“Why am I making you wait? Because I want you to focus on me as a master, your trainer, not as a fuck buddy. BDSM is about a whole lot more than sex.”
“And I still want you to fuck me.”
“And that, Alana, may be the most honest you’ve ever been. Cup your tits with your palms.”
She made herself concentrate on her breathing. She tried to tear her gaze away from the clamps, but she couldn’t. She was fixated on them.
“Are you familiar with the different types of clamps?”
She shook her head.
“These are Japanese clovers,” he told her. “Some are more intense than others. This particular pair is deceptively wicked. Unlike other clamps, these don’t have screws or biting metal teeth.” He squeezed one open and showed it to her. “This part will close around your nipple.”
She nodded. It didn’t look too bad. And if they didn’t screw or have metal teeth… That was a plus, right?
Ethan went on, “In fact, they’re lined with cork. You won’t feel an immediate bite like you might with others. The pressure intensifies over time.”
Ah. Uhm.
“And they won’t become dislodged or fall off when you move. Pinch your nipples.”
Even as she did, Alana kept staring straight at the clamps. Now that she was distracted by them, she barely noticed the cold, unyielding floor beneath her knees. It was all perspective, she realised.
“Now pull your nipples out, away from your body. Good,” he approved. “Now twist them. Hold them.”
Signed, Sealed & Delivered Page 7