Breaking Brandi (9 page)

She closed her eyes, but that only seemed to
focus her mind more surely on the sensations flooding her. Her head
began to swim as the drugging euphoria of bliss sucked her
down.

Despite the clouding of her mind, she tensed
as she felt the heated flick of a tongue along one thigh. The
licking moved lower, traced her nether lips and the seam where they
met. After a moment, the tongue parted her nether lips, flicking
along her cleft. Gasping, she pushed backward with her legs, moving
away from the touch.

To her relief, instead of following her, he
moved away.

Her relief was short lived. A moment later,
the high priest knelt over her. Straddling her belly, he dragged
her hips to the edge of the offering stone once more until it bit
into her buttocks and her legs strained against the counter pull of
the manacles around her ankles. Tightening his knees around her, he
pinned her so that she couldn’t move. As a tongue flicked along her
thigh once more, he caught the fleshly lips of her sex and pulled
them wide, stretching her so that the mouth of her sex opened.

She felt the flicking tongue move along the
tender flesh of her cleft, sending sharp stabs of pleasure through
her belly. Moving up her cleft, the hot tongue flicked the tiny,
exquisitely sensitive bud of her clit, until heated desire had her
belly clenching and unclenching. She gasped when he nipped her,
sending a sizzling shaft of arousal through her. He didn’t linger.
Once he’d bitten her, he moved downward again and she felt the
tongue thrust inside of her. It seemed to swell, to lengthen,
undulating through her passage. As it began to slowly withdraw, the
high priest’s hold shifted, spreading her body’s opening wider so
that the tongue plunged more deeply inside her, curling against the
walls of her passage, stroking her.

She shook, tried to twist away and
discovered she couldn’t. The thrusting continued until she was
gasping hoarsely, her body trembling.

As he moved away, the high priest shifted
once more. Bending his head, he opened his mouth over her exposed
flesh and sucked and licked her clit almost savagely, punishing her
for her attempts to escape the invasive tongue until she was
gasping shrilly.

She was trembling on the brink of release
when he lifted his head. She shuddered at the abrupt cessation of
stimulation, feeling a shiver skate through her as her body began
to cool. Moments passed. While she struggled to catch her breath,
the priests began to nip and lick at her breasts and belly once
more, her arms, her neck.

Her flesh quivered as she felt the skate of
a hot tongue along her thigh. As the tortuous sensations neared her
sex, the high priest caught her nether lips, pulling them wide and
offering the exquisitely sensitive inner flesh for the delectation
of the worshippers of Nhewa.

The heated tongue moved back and forth along
her cleft, nipping at her clit until she began to quake with
imminent release. She fought it, dreading it, knowing that once it
began they would not allow it to stop until they were ready to move
on. As he moved down her cleft, the high priest shifted his hold on
her, spreading the mouth of her passage wide to receive the tongue
of the other priest. Two others approached her, flicked their
tongues over her nipples and bit down on them as the tongue was
thrust deeply inside of her. She gasped sharply, her body
convulsing with pleasure. It continued to spasm as the tongue was
thrust into her over and over.

The moment the priest withdrew and moved
away, the high priest shifted again, burying his face against the
tender flesh, sucking her clit into his mouth, teasing it with his
tongue. The tremors of her climax, which had began to subside,
mounted once more, tearing through her in almost painful waves
until she was screaming with the nearly unbearable pleasure.

Darkness began to engulf her before he
ceased to torment her.

She was still gasping, trying to catch her
breath when they began moving over her again. Her body, heated now
to the point of release, was not allowed to cool more than a
handful of moments as they continued the ritual unceasingly,
teasing her flesh to such sensitivity she felt faint, dizzy. Each
time the serpent approached to spear her womb with his tongue, the
high priest parted the lips of her sex, opening her wide for them
and holding her. Again and again they brought her to culmination,
until she was hoarse from crying out, until her flesh quivered and
shook without cease.

She wasn’t even aware that the torment had
ended at last until she felt her ankles freed from the manacles and
her legs dropped limply to the floor. When her wrists were freed,
the high priest scooped her into his arms and lifted her.

She hung limply, too weak even to feel much
dread as he strode from the circle and lay her face down on the
altar. She was dragged back until her feet touched the floor. Her
legs were spread wide, her ankles chained again. The manacles were
placed around her wrists once more, drawn upward so that her arms
were above her head, her cheek resting against the cold stone.

She’d thought that they had wrung every
ounce of pleasure from her body that could be had, but as the first
moved behind her, parted her buttocks and shoved his cock into her
rectum, her body began scaling the heights once more. One after
another, they drove into her frenziedly until she gasped hoarsely
and came, and still the ritual continued until she lost count of
the number of times her body was wracked by spasms of pleasure and
fell finally into a deep black pit.

The shivering as her heated flesh began to
cool—was finally allowed to—roused her to dim awareness and she
realized that she was cradled in Ulrick’s arms. Carrying her to a
room with a wide bed, he laid her upon it and joined her. Instead
of merely throwing one arm and leg over her, however, he gathered
her close against his body, wrapping his arms around her.

“You will displease them if you continue to
fight them, little one,” Ulrick said gruffly. “And if you displease
the god Nhewa and his followers, you will beg for death before it
finds you. Yield to them. Take the pleasure they offer you and be
grateful they prefer the elixir of your pleasure to the distillate
of your pain.”

“Ulrick?” she whispered, but she didn’t know
if he responded or not. Within moments, strangely reassured by the
steady pounding of his heart beneath her ear, she sank into
oblivion again.

Chapter Six

When she had been bathed the following
morning, the priests dressed her in a deep blue gown. She glanced
at Ulrick as he took the chain attached to her manacles, but there
was no sign of the man who’d shown her gentleness the night before,
kindness—empathy when he warned her that trying to fight was both
useless and dangerous. Ulrick the hardened soldier/gladiator/slave
looked back at her, his eyes filled with nothing beyond the cold
detachment she’d grown accustomed to but heat and
possessiveness.

Lust.

She swallowed with an effort, struggling
with a sense of self-pity and hopelessness. The look should have
heartened her, for it could only mean that she was right. She
had
made some progress with him. Ulrick, drawn by the
pleasures of the flesh, was slowly but surely losing his iron
control over himself.

Unfortunately, she’d begun to realize that
Ulrich was as much in control of her as vice versa. He had only to
look at her and her body responded with welcoming heat. His rough
possession of her drove her into mindless bliss.

Moreover, she’d seen no more than a glimpse
of what she believed to be the soul of a man inside. If she was, in
truth, breaking through to him, why could she not see his gentle
side more frequently? For longer periods of time?

Was she just imagining he had a softer side
that she had some hope of appealing to?

When they had left the temple behind and set
out across the plain once more, she remembered the words he had
spoken to her the night before, the way he’d held her.

That hadn’t been imagination. It hadn’t been
a dream.

She didn’t think.

Pushing aside her doubts, she considered the
‘warning’. After replaying each ‘session’ in her mind, she realized
that she’d struggled every time she’d been handed over to the
priests. Every single damned time, despite her own certainty that
fighting them was a very bad idea.

She’d thought the binding and the attempts
to screw her to death were part of the ritual, but it seemed that
Ulrick had been warning her that it was her own actions that had
precipitated the severity of her offering.

She hadn’t given willingly so they’d
forced
her to offer and punished her by prolonging her
offering until she was about ready to expire from giving.

That was what it sounded like he was saying
anyway.

And, possibly, that they might decide to
torture her with pain rather than pleasure if she continued to
fight them.

A cold, sickening dread invaded her at that
thought.

She didn’t think she could handle hours of
pain in the place of the hours of pleasure—not when she could
barely endure the pleasure for that length of time, when it felt
like they’d drained her almost to the point of separating her soul
from her body!

To her surprise, Ulrick pulled the beast to
a halt as soon as they’d entered the forest at the edge of the
plain. Her belly tightened with a mixture of dread and anticipation
as he turned her to face him. Grasping the edges of the robe the
priests had placed on her at the neck, he ripped it in two from
neck to hem and then removed her manacles and shoved the sleeves
from her arms.

Confused and unnerved, Brandi could do
nothing but gape at him as he removed the tattered robe, wadded it
into a ball and looked around as if for a place to pitch it.
Finally, he merely shoved it into the pack on the beast’s rump.
Without a word, he settled her with her back against his chest once
more, guided the beast off of the trail they’d been following and
headed deeper into the woods.

More confusing, he abandoned the almost
leisurely pace he’d set as they’d crossed the plain and urged the
guak to a pace that became more hazardous the deeper they
penetrated the forest because of the thicker vegetation.

Anticipation pounded through Brandi for a
while—until it finally occurred to her that he either had no
intention of stopping soon or he wasn’t looking for a place to stop
at all.

Apparently, the latter was true, because
when hunger began to roil in her belly, he simply answered the call
by handing her a small piece of the bread-type food from his pack
and kept going. She had no idea whether he simply stumbled upon the
stream they found several hours later or if it had been his
destination all along. Whatever the case, he halted the beast and
slid out of the saddle, carrying her with him.

Releasing her once she had her feet under
her, he led the animal to the stream and stood watching while it
drank its fill.

Brandi stared at him blankly for several
moments and finally looked down at her wrists—free of the heavy
manacles—and then around at the alien forest.

A wave of hope, fear, shock, excitement …
anticipation rolled over her with the force of a tidal wave.

She could escape!

The adrenaline flow from her thoughts and
impulses was so heady she felt like she might pass out as it
drained away almost as quickly with the reflection that she didn’t
have a hope in hell of escaping even if she wasn’t chained.

Truthfully, it wouldn’t have mattered if
she’d found herself in the same situation in an Earthly forest. She
would’ve been just as lost and out of her element and clueless
about how to survive alone. The only difference was that, on Earth,
she would’ve had some hope of finding people that might help
her.

Here, there was no chance of that.

Sighing, she looked around again and finally
moved behind a tree to relieve herself and then to the water’s edge
to bathe off and refresh herself after the long ride.

They ate in silence. Brandi was almost too
tied to eat at all, and certainly too tired to try to think of
anything to say. He allowed her to doze for a little while after
they’d eaten before he drew her to her feet and led her to the
beast once more.

She struggled, briefly, to stay awake when
they set off again, but finally gave up the effort, settled as
comfortably against Ulrich’s hard form as she could, and slept. She
woke when the beast stopped, lifting her head with a jerk and
looking around fearfully.

She saw that they were still in the forest,
however, and relief flooded her. Wordlessly, Ulrick slid from the
saddle and then pulled her down and set her on her feet. He removed
his pack and bedroll from the animal then. Dropping both to the
ground in the small clearing, he led the beast away. Brandi watched
him a little dazedly, still too drugged from fatigue to manage to
put two consecutive thoughts together. Finally, when he didn’t
reappear immediately, she looked around and then simply wilted to
the ground, tempted to curl into a ball on top of the leaves. She
was half asleep when he returned. After nudging her with his foot
to rouse her, he moved away, collecting his pack and pulling what
was left of the loaf from it. When they’d eaten, he led her into
the woods and allowed her to relieve herself and then led her to a
stream. Reflecting rather morosely that there’d been a time when
she was the next thing to germ-a-phobic and wouldn’t have touched
anything not sterilized—let alone something she was standing in—she
drank as much water as she could hold, bathed, and then struggled
out of the stream.

They wandered around briefly. Brandi had
just decided he’d gotten turned around and lost when he stopped to
examine an enormous tree that had thick, knobby, exposed roots.
“Wait here.”