by Emily Tilton
“I shall call you that often, Miss Grant,” Nele said gently. “Come and sit beside me, and let me embrace you.”
Susan did, and Nele saw bright tears in her eyes as he held her close for a moment. He kissed her chastely and said, “Tell me truly, Miss Grant. Should I or should I not display your cunny to young William?”
She shivered in his arms. “You should, my lord, because it is your will.”
Nele’s heart seemed to expand in his chest. “Would you care to continue your tale, Miss Grant?”
“Is it your will that I should, my lord?” Her voice sounded very small, and the sound of it made him embrace her even more tightly.
“Yes, Miss Grant. For you have come into my power, and you must undergo the indignities I command and tell me the tales for which I ask.” What an odd thing to say, Nele thought—as if he had eloped with her and had not yet enjoyed her. It seemed a game, and yet not a game, that they played, and it seemed also that neither one of them wished it to have more definition than it did already, as if to name it might lay it to ruins.
Chapter Twelve
“I suppose now that when Mr. Oldham heard that Mr. Greatrex had outraged me so thoroughly,” Susan continued, “his loins must have been afire to have me that way himself, despite his essentially kind nature. I have found that the voluptuous urges of men often do not match their characters in society, my lord, and though Mr. Oldham showed me great compassion, when he understood that he might do to me as he wished in the little boudoir he took for me in Cheapside, he always took me very roughly indeed.”
“Did he now?” asked Nele—and now for the first time Susan realized, to her surprise, that she had begun to think of him solely by his Christian name. Did she hear in his voice the rising again of his voluptuous nature and his own sympathetic arousal at the thought of outraging Susan himself, as indeed he certainly had the night before and surely planned on doing very soon? That thought made her own unsatisfied cunny clench and grow warm, interfering a bit with the concentration she felt she needed to tell her tale so as to explain fully to Nele how it had all come to pass.
“Yes, my lord. The first time he had me along… let me say… Cupid’s ordinary pathway? the way babies are made?” She could not see his face in the darkness of the carriage, now, but she hoped he could tell how badly she wished to please him with her mode of speech, and to play the adult game to which he had invited her.
“Either of those locutions is acceptable, Miss Grant,” Nele said. His voice became deeper and more avuncular as he seemed to warm to the task of instructing Susan this way. “It is not easy for a young lady like yourself to find the proper way in which to refer to the many indecencies that have befallen you. I can tell, though, that you have a will to speak modestly, which predisposes me to undertake your instruction. Pray, continue.”
But the lights of a town had appeared before them, Susan realized, and William called from the box, “Great Jorkin, my lord.”
Nele called up, “We’ll stop the night here, and you’ll have that look I promised you.”
Though that look had been announced hours since, in much more explicit terms, something about the way Nele spoke now of it, euphemistically and without reference to what exactly William the coachman would look at, together with the looming lights of the inn—by which William would do his gazing—seemed to rob Susan of her wits much more thoroughly than the notion had before. Lord Nele spoke masterfully, as if to conceal from his trollop that he had on a lark promised a servant a look at the quim that belonged to the nobleman—as if it were no concern of Susan’s to whom her master chose to exhibit the place between her legs where Lord Nele’s cock thrust when he chose to take his ease with his little slut.
She felt herself blushing again, and again the warmth in the spot William would see grew together with the warmth in her face. Without even intending to speak, she found herself saying, “My lord, please… please don’t let him.”
“Nonsense, Miss Grant,” Nele said bluffly. “Have you not been made to show your charms before? Were you not just telling me about Mr. Oldham, who must have made you display yourself to his lustful eyes many a time, to say nothing of Lord Granby, who I know loves to share his girls, and indeed of me last night in his lordship’s dining room. You will raise your skirts and show William how sweet you look without your curls, or they will be raised for you, and William shall spank you before I do.”
“Oh, my lord,” Susan said with a little sob whose nature she could not for the world have told him for she did not know it herself. She felt such shame—more shame, she thought, than she had felt since Mrs. Greatrex had caned her, telling her over and over that naughty girls who told stories about their bare bottoms must pay a terrible price upon that same bare bottom so that they might learn their lesson. But where that shame had felt wild, and the confused excitement it produced had frightened Susan so greatly that she could focus only on the pain, this shame felt tightly controlled by the man who had promised to protect her, and thus the delicious tendrils of arousal that seemed to stroke her gently but tormentingly between her legs felt just as powerful as the degradation.
The thought of being spanked by the coachman while Nele watched seemed to fill her mind, too. Did she want that to happen? No, but… but if Lord Nele, her protector, decided she must submit to a spanking from the coachman after he had seen her cunny, then… well, then, it must be the lesson Nele wanted her to learn, and she must undergo that lesson. She belonged to him now. All of her belonged to him: Sue, Susan, and Miss Grant. Even if modest Miss Grant should need a very thorough chastisement, in order to return her to a modest frame of mind, such as having to show all the guests in the inn the bareness a man had enforced between her thighs before having her bare bottom publicly whipped, Susan must accept it. She did not want it, but the thought of such things happening whether she wanted them or no sent the shivering, feverish excitement coursing through her shameful places.
While Susan thought all these things, trembling silently in the carriage, they arrived swiftly at Great Jorkin. In the yard of the inn, Nele assisted her in alighting, whispering in her ear as she stepped down from the carriage, “We are Mr. and Mrs. Loomis.”
Susan had traveled enough with Lord Granby and Sir David to understand what he meant, and she nodded, though the idea of feigning a marriage with him made her flush in a very different way than the thought of the shameful things he might do with her had just a moment before. She let go with a quixotic regret of the idea that Nele would raise her skirts here and have William take his look before they even entered the inn, and entered into the very different frame of mind required to pretend to be a demure young bride. She found it wonderfully reassuring, nevertheless, that Nele would trust her to understand him and to play her part well, as if his mastery of his own nature allowed him to shift in and out of his will to dominate her.
She waited, demure in the dark gown that could suit a middle-class bride as well as it suited a housemaid, while Nele took a chamber. He turned to William and said, “William, you’ll come up to the chamber to wait upon me?”
“Yes, m—… sir,” William said, catching himself just in time.
Nele turned back to the innkeeper. “We have had to leave Mrs. Loomis’ girl at home. Is there a maid who might wait upon her?”
“Yes, sir. Of course,” said the innkeeper. Susan smiled at Nele; having been a servant—or worse—for so many months she would never have thought of it, but of course it would be highly suspect if no thought were paid to the matter. “Tilly will be with you in ten minutes, if that suits, ma’am.”
How very strange to be called ma’am, Susan thought as she climbed the stairs. To have fallen into the power of a lord who shows me to a coachman and makes an innkeeper call me ma’am.
Tilly came, and showed herself very efficient though it felt exceedingly strange to Susan to play the part of the lady undressing for the night, having her hair put back and her gown and petticoat and corset put away. She pres
sed the shilling Nele had given her into the maid’s hand and Tilly departed, and Susan must await the coming of Mr. Loomis and the coachman to whom Mr. Loomis had promised the shameful thing. Nele had ordered claret to drink while his ‘wife’ undressed, for of course a man must not see that ceremony.
As the minutes passed, Susan wondered whether she should position herself in some particular way, to show either how modest she remained despite the terrible indignity to be inflicted upon her by her ‘husband’ or in how much need she stood of condign correction. In her mind’s eye she pictured herself on all fours upon the four-poster bed, across it, with her bottom facing the door and her shift raised—or even stripped completely off. Mrs. Loomis showing how very wanton a bride Mr. Loomis had chosen: the sort of bride a man must be very careful to curb with a firm hand applied to her bare backside, discipline bestowed with great regularity, perhaps weekly or even daily.
Perhaps she would put her hand down to touch herself there as Mrs. Greatrex had told her she must have done when she made up the story about Mr. Greatrex, and as she had indeed done thinking about the way he had possessed her bottom. And she had done it when Sir David told her to, while he watched. Was it not the lewdest, most wanton thing, though, still? Should not a girl who touched her own cunny without permission learn a terrible lesson? Such a Mrs. Loomis, or such a Miss Grant, must surely have her wicked cunny shown to a coachman, so that she might understand how very great the penalties are for young women who touch themselves between their thighs.
Sitting on the bed in her shift, Susan felt her hand drifting there, up her thigh, underneath the thin cotton of the shift. When Sir David had told her to touch the cunt whose hair he had just removed with the candle, it had seemed like someone else’s hand and someone else’s quim. But now… here as Mrs. Loomis… Susan herself… did she choose to do that… that wicked thing for which girls must be caned, or whipped, or shown naked, or all… all… all of…
The door opened just as Susan, spreading her knees slightly, pressed her middle finger against the little bud where all her voluptuousness seemed to lie always at the ready. She whimpered at the sensation, and at the sound of the key in the latch. As Nele entered she pulled her hand out from under her shift, and she could see in his face that he knew exactly what she had got up to in his absence, waiting for her shameful lesson. She could see William standing behind him, as tall and dark as Lord Nele, and if not as handsome, certainly more imposing in his musculature.
Susan expected that Lord Nele would make his way to her immediately, with words of mastery and reproof, and though she feared them she also longed for those words. But before he entered and before he spoke, his dominant expression softened for the briefest of moments, and his eyes became quizzical, his eyebrows raised in an unmistakable question to Susan, for which the gratitude rushed to her heart so strongly she almost cried out with it: Do you want to play my game?
Susan felt her lips twitch into the tiniest of smiles, and then she saw in Nele’s face that in that twitch he had his answer. His face became stern again and he said, “Oho, William! I think the little slut has been playing with herself as she awaited you.” He entered the room, and William entered it after him. Nele closed the door. “Is that right, Mrs. Loomis?” he asked Susan. “Did you decide that William here should have an even better show than I intended? Well, perhaps you don’t know what happens to young wives who put their naughty fingers on their husbands’ property. William, where you come from, what happens to a young bride when her husband catches her playing with the cunt the church and state together decree to belong to him, for the sole use of his cock, when he wishes to plow that fertile field, to sow his lawful seed and demonstrate to her that she is his property—to be used as he sees fit?”
By the end of this speech Susan had begun to breathe so hard, in her arousal and her struggle to keep her hand from returning just where Nele now said it must not go, that she thought she must faint. She looked at William’s coarse, youthful face, where a smile had broken out.
“Well,” he said slowly, “I heard tell, at the pub in my village one time, of how a young wife got the cane for that, twelve of the best, and then her man had her up the arse so that she couldn’t enjoy the rogering he gave her.”
Chapter Thirteen
Nele watched Susan’s expression as William delivered his wisdom in a sort of haze of cock-stiffening enchantment. The burly coachman had such an air of truth about him that Nele didn’t even think to wonder whether his wonderful tale of a farmer in a pub telling stories of arse-fucking his pretty bride might be a falsehood, or even perhaps slightly exaggerated. In Susan’s eyes he could see the same conviction; more, though she knew she had not suddenly become married Mrs. Loomis, she clearly felt that William’s rural wisdom must apply to her when Nele decided the penalty for her having touched herself between her thighs.
Best of all, despite the truth of the matter being that Nele had had her that way just the night before, Susan as young Mrs. Loomis could clearly think herself into an innocence that brought her back to a time before the vicar had sodomized her, his son’s governess, so wickedly. The crease in her brow and the flush in her cheeks told him that just then, under threat not only of having her quim shown to the coachman but of having him present to witness the terrible punishment it seemed she must receive for her straying fingers, she felt like an innocent bride who had never even seen her husband’s cock, everything on their wedding night having gone on under the bedclothes.
“Stand up, Susan,” Nele said sternly, “and raise your shift. William will examine your cunny now. Then we shall discuss your punishment. I find William’s story most helpful, and I think perhaps he should remain here to advise me, and to demonstrate, as I teach you your lesson.”
As Susan began to obey, trembling like a leaf, Nele felt his mind might burst with all the various possibilities of the scene. He had never in his life known the sense of… collaboration he felt with Susan Grant. In a little more than twenty-four hours, they had learned, it seemed, everything they needed to know about one another: the parts of their pasts that mattered to them most, because they concerned this—the wanton wickedness that neither of them, it appeared, could do without.
Once she stood upon her feet in front of the bed, with her hands tugging at the cotton that covered her thighs, she looked into Nele’s eyes and whispered, “Must I, my lord?”
“You must, Miss Grant,” Nele said gravely, understanding beyond any doubt that she wanted exactly that reassurance: the lewdness fired her blood if she knew that Nele desired it, and that Nele would ensure that his desire became a law for her. She wanted to know that as Susan Grant, under the protection of Lord Nele Lourcy.
She bit her lip and nodded once, her brow furrowed and her eyes downcast to Nele’s waist, as if trying to see his hard manhood through the front of his trousers. She began to gather the stuff of the shift and to raise it. Her white thighs came into view, and then the bare little cleft and the sweet vee of her loins, demurely hiding all her pink secrets between her thighs. Nele felt sure she knew she would be required to show more, but on Susan’s bright red face he saw again that she needed his authority.
He turned to William. “Her last master, I understand, bared her there. I haven’t had the tale of that yet. Miss Grant, why did Sir David take away your private curls?”
Her voice quavered as she spoke. “He showed me a… a vase from ancient Greece. It was so naughty… there were girls on it, naked, and he said that they were girls like me, who had to learn how to please men with their… charms.”
She looked into his eyes, pleading with him not to have to continue, but Nele said, “And what were the naked girls doing, Miss Grant?”
“Th-they held a—a lamp… one girl was holding it for another, between her legs, and they were all bare, there, and Sir David said it was because they were singeing each other, to take the hair away, and I must have it done to me, too, and then keep doing it once a week to keep myself bare for h
im.”
“As an antiquarian pursuit? A sort of experiment in archeology?” Nele affected a blasé tone, though his cock had stood very straight at the story. He turned to William. “You must understand that gentlemen sometimes get up to this sort of thing, William, in private.”
“Yes, my lord,” William replied in his deep country baritone. “I can’t deny that it’s a fine sight to see. I’ve often thought as I tasted a girl there that I’d like to take all her hair away so that I could get a really good look and see what I was about.”
“Was that it, Susan?” Nele asked. “Did Sir David want to kiss you down there?”
“He did do that, my lord, and it was very embarrassing though I can’t deny how lovely it felt. But he told me that the real reason he wanted my charms bare was that he wanted me to understand that I had no covering upon my nakedness except the clothes he chose to give me. He would often lift my skirts to inspect me, and sometimes he would make me touch myself there while he watched.”
“Now there’s an idea, William!” Nele said. “Perhaps that should come before the caning? Should Miss Grant give us a little performance, and show you how sweet she looks, and learn that if she touches herself it must be because I have commanded it and not because she has decided to be wicked?”