Under His Sway (3 page)

“He made me beg him to flog me and…”

I ran my tongue along the curl of her ear, then sucked her earlobe until I felt her shudder against me. “And?”

“And use me with it.” That said, she went limp against me, her forehead flush against my shoulder. The rigor in her back gone. No stiffness at all left in her shoulders.

“Did you enjoy what he did, Chloe?”

Little voice. “Yes, sir.”

So gently—because I wanted to be rough far too much right now, so close to breaking her open—I whispered, “Get down on your knees. Here, at the foot of the bed. And put your forehead to the rug, arms out in front of you.”

I was glad now I’d used the mink flogger on Chloe earlier in the evening. There was a fine line between pushing a submissive, bending her, and making her balk. Or even shattering her outright. There’d be less fear of the flogger itself. She was already afraid enough of…

Of what? I asked myself this as I retrieved the flogger from the wooden travel chest I kept to one side of the bed. Fear I’d be too harsh and really hurt her? Fear of what I’d think of her? Or fear of what she’d think of herself?

I’d been with enough women in the last twenty years to have been stunned by how squeamish so many of them could be about admitting their lusts and pleasuring themselves. Especially when I was younger, I’d known women who had never used a vibrator on themselves, let alone something
else
. More American women than European, who were generally more relaxed in their skins, and fewer Brazilian women than most South American beauties, who had the Church issuing its dire warnings about giving in to needs of the flesh. I could understand it might have been hard for Chloe to admit she wanted to be treated like a dirty little girl, to admit she wanted
me
to want her like that.

If I had been her boyfriend rather than her Master, if this had been a relationship instead of a temporary arrangement, the thing to do might well have been to comfort her, pull her gently back from the edge and make her feel secure. But I wasn’t… And this wasn’t… And I wanted everything she had to give me.

Fully aware I was being a bastard, but exactly the bastard she wanted me to be, I selected the mink flogger and a small bottle of gel lubricant—just in case—from the selection of goodies in the chest. And I turned…

The sight of Chloe prone at the foot of my bed—her small, curvy body bent, curled, shivering so slightly in apprehension and anticipation—put a hitch in my breathing and my step. I rotated the flogger lightly in my restless fingers, my fingertips memorizing the coiled and crisscrossed texture of the leather thong wrapping the handle in contrast to the memory of the silkiness of Chloe’s skin. Skin that I would burnish to a light rose while she sighed and moaned behind her clenched teeth, trying to resist me and the pleasure, as usual. Just as she had earlier tonight.

The lush black straps of the flogger trailed heavy from the handle. I placed the bottle of lubricant on the floor beside the bed and tested the balance of the tool in my hand. With some skill, I drew the leather-backed mink strips through my fingers and lashed out to tip them along her bowed spine. Though they were soft, the straps weighed enough to bite. She shivered at the tiny stings, and my breath shuddered lightly with her. I swallowed it back so she wouldn’t hear. Again I tipped her with the flogger, grazing her with just ends. Again she started and shivered.

The weight of the luxurious toy made the smooth rotation of my wrist and the timing of my strikes an effort to maintain, especially as my arousal grew with Chloe’s. But I kept up a smooth rhythm, the wide fur straps slapping against her bared and vulnerable skin over and over as blood answered the call of stimulation and desire and flushed her back light pink. The change came over her little by little, as she stopped jumping at each strike, as her shoulders relaxed and her greatest concern became maintaining her breathing amidst the litany of tiny moans swarming up from inside her.

Receiving a good flogging could be therapeutic at the least but a religious experience at its best. It had a tendency to make a person turn their thoughts inward, concentrating first on their bodily reaction and then on how they
felt
about those reactions. Chloe was no different. She melted into it now, matching her breathing to the rhythm of my strikes. It was like playing a beautiful instrument, and it was addictive.

By the time I came down on one knee behind Chloe and dragged my nails so gently and lightly down the curve of her sensitized spine, we were both awash in the heat of desire, the heat of exertion, the flush of coursing blood. I laid a kiss on her tailbone, unable to resist a moment’s worship of this woman giving herself so bravely if ever so reluctantly. Nuzzling my rough cheek against her skin, I smiled to myself when she sighed my name. I didn’t even care she hadn’t called me sir.

“So warm,” I whispered from the base of her spine, and she breathed out in time with me and tossed her long, wild hair back to glance over her shoulder at me. So coy. So hesitant. But so hopeful. “Are you ready, Miss Bloom?”

She jerked briefly and shuddered a halting breath as I traced the end of the flogger handle along her vulnerable, gleaming cleft.

“It’s okay, Chloe. It’s okay to want this.” I let the rounded edges of the handle part the lips of her sex and enter her just a fraction of an inch, just enough to make those tight, sensitive muscles flare and complain and yearn. “If you must feel ashamed, revel in it. Be naughty for me. Be my dirty girl and take the pleasure I give you. I
insist
.”

She arched and clawed the white rug beneath her as the flogger penetrated her, as her private spaces relented to the invasion little by little. I bent low behind her and let my warm tongue play against the tender span of flesh between her pussy and the tight pink bud of her anus. Again my name, hissed in a reluctant but reverent murmur. And again I didn’t care she hadn’t said sir. My name was her surrender, and these confessions and her pleasure were my terms.

“Oh god,” she swore, her voice high and tight, her arms stretched out before her as though straining for help, for mercy. The handle was not that much bigger than my own member, but it did not yield, was not warm,
was not me
. Yet I knew it was fulfilling its purpose and she was obeying my command that she ceased to fret and simply be when I sank the handle to the hilt and she rocked back for more.

“That’s it, Miss Bloom. Take your pleasure from wherever it comes.” I kissed her tender skin again, then let my tongue toy along the edge of her sex. The slight salt, slight tang of her juices made my mouth water and my erection ache. I doubted she’d have understood the self-denial it took to give her this when I wanted to be inside her.

“Talk to me, Chloe. Is this what you want? Is this the way he did it to you?”

“Please,” she keened.

“Please what, Miss Bloom?” I pulsed the handle inside her. “Please no? Please more? You aren’t answering me, Chloe. I won’t have that, not from my dirty little girl.” Then I began to rotate the makeshift dildo inside her wet core and listened to the music of her breathing as it rose to a high, fast pant. So close. So nearly mine. “Is this what he did to you?”

“He was rougher,” she murmured, her voice muffled as she hid behind her arm, only those cinnamon brown eyes peeking over at me.

I frowned at the idea of Penn Ellison taking Chloe, using her, with ferocity and passion. “Do you want rougher, Miss Bloom?”

“No,” she sighed. “I want…”

Playing her needs quite intentionally, I laved her private spaces with my wide, eager tongue. Along the slick lips of her smooth-shaven sex and around the nervous blossom of her anus. “You want what, Miss Bloom? Say it.”

My own breath was thick now, and I almost caught myself saying please to my submissive. Ah, the true nature of power exchange…and the true mistress. She didn’t know what I would have given to mean to her what Penn obviously did, and I didn’t want her to know. She didn’t need it, not to serve her purpose, to be the better reflection of me than a mirror could be. Less true, more forgiving.

This was what the women in my life were to me, the ones I chose to invite into my world and keep as long as they would let me. Not the Nina Talbots but the Manuelas. The Chloe Blooms. Women who could make me forget what it was like to be detested and ignored as a boy, as a young man. As the black mark on the family lineage. Women who could erase the cares of international business, of social positioning, of Forbes lists and the personal agendas of everyone I met. For a few moments, when Manuela straightened my collar or Chloe sighed against my lip, they erased my transgressions and my cares. They erased…me.

Chloe flailed out, reached back for me, to my surprise. Her fingers threaded into my hair and tugged as she whined and wriggled against my tongue. Back and forth, an inch at most, I worked the handle in her pussy, pulsing and teasing, tormenting and promising.

“I want…” She bit her bottom lip hard and sucked her breath in through her teeth.

I straightened behind her, rising to my knees, still moving the handle as I laid my stiff cock along the crevice of her perfect, round ass. Her hand slid from my hair and pressed flat against my tensed abdomen, palm pushing me away but fingernails digging into flesh in encouragement.

“You want? Do it. Say it, Chloe.” Surrender.

The only sound she made with an incoherent murmur, small and inexact. Her eyes gleamed with desire but narrowed, as though she struggled to focus, to concentrate.

The fingers of my free hand curled tight around the arm she extended back toward me. Using this leverage, I ground my erection hard along the delicious curve of her backside, against the pursed opening of her most private passage. “You want this, Chloe? You want to squirm for me and beg for me? You want me to know what a dirty girl you are and love it and make you love it? Make you admit it?”

“Yes,” she groaned. “Yes.”

I came down over her on hands and knees then and grated with hot and heavy breath into her ear. “Then say it, Chloe, and
be
it. You’re my dirty girl. Say it, baby.” I rocked against her, and she huffed and squirmed despite the fact that I had yet to penetrate her with more than a few inches of the leather-wrapped handle.

“I’m your dirty girl.”

“Yes.” I swept damp strands of hair back from her sweaty cheek to gaze down her face. Parted bee-stung lips and lust-glazed eyes. “Again, Chloe.”

“I’m your dirty girl,” she rasped louder. I saw the vibration shudder through her arms, her limbs weakening from tension and exertion, from straining and reaching, from the push-pull of wanting what she couldn’t admit. “Please…”

Pushing the handle deeper into her pussy, but just deep enough that I wouldn’t have to hold it, I sighed huskily against her neck. “Not quite yet, baby. My dirty girl, not his. Not his…” She peered over her shoulder again, brown eyes on mine for an instant, and I read something small and frightened there. Confusion? Uncertainty? Or that moment before she might let herself dare? “Mine,” I repeated and kissed and gnawed at the salty, moist skin of her nape.

“Yours,” she whispered, and a moment later added, “not his.”

“Again.”

Slowly but precisely she enunciated the words I demanded, the vow I had drawn from her once at the end of her first week with me on the island. It had been a tentative submission then. I wanted a promise now.

“Yours,” she breathed and blinked at me beneath her wet lashes before she laid her cheek against the rug and rubbed herself against me in invitation. “Yours, sir.”

Trying not shift too far from my position bent over her, unwilling to give up the sensation of her warm, pliant body beneath mine, I reached for the bottle of lubricant. Chloe didn’t jerk or flinch as I drizzled the cool gel along the pink bud of her anus. I worked my thumb in circles along her primed opening, not just to spread the lubricant but to tease her, to make that tight blossom
want
to open for me. With the first pressure from the head of my cock, it parted, embracing me, welcoming me deep.

Chloe held her breath during those initial few moments, as the bulbous tip of my member sank into her. Despite the urge to thrust forward, I made myself pause and give her time to adapt to this new invasion, this new demand and such immensely intimate use. When the arch of her back softened and then sagged, limp and almost relaxed, I pushed forward again. She was so tight and warm…and mine. I was the one shivering and gasping low in the back of my throat as I advanced until my hips rested flush with her buttocks.

It was all heat and barely contained fury then. Grunts of effort and moans of surprise. An unexpected giggle under a breath, mine as well as hers. Slick skin sliding against slick skin and the delicious friction of her tightness around my member. Panting harder and harder, she writhed back against me, and I recoiled my hips and pounded into her, our every sound and movement matched by the distant ocean waves beyond the shutters and trees. The rush of tides. The wracking waves strong enough to crush the unwary and ill-prepared.

It wasn’t a conscious choice, but I wasn’t sure I’d have chosen any differently. I had one arm locked and planted beside Chloe’s shoulder, the other coiled around her waist. And it was happening. In an instant, my release was upon me, and I spilled myself inside her for the first time. I’d been careful not to let this happen with anyone
for years
. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been like this. Maybe Chloe deserved more. But I couldn’t even bring myself to regret it, as inadvisable as it was to let myself so enjoy the feeling—the sense of claiming her. For her part, she went still underneath me, seeming not so much to retreat as to simply wait, breathless and patient and understanding. My Chloe. Dare I refer to her—even think of her—in those terms?

When I was done, when every ounce of energy and possessiveness and seed had spilled out of me and into this woman, my strength left me. With chagrin, I recognized the fatigue trembling through my supporting arm, and I came down on my side on the rug, pulling Chloe with me. I withdrew from her only at length—the toy as well—and reluctantly, but I remained spooned up against her as our breathing slowed.