Iron Dominance (19 page)

Slowly she edged down her underwear, let them slip to the floor, then bent and grasped her ankles, staring at the brown pumps on her feet, waiting, biting her lip, wondering when he would—

The paddle slammed into her, hard enough to make her teeth slide and chatter. The vibration shot through her body as if she’d been shaken by a storm. A fraction of a second later, in its aftermath, her bottom stung like all hell, and heat flared, her lower body throbbing. She gasped and almost straightened. He’d said not to move. She glanced back at him, past her legs, her bottom up in the air.

Theo said nothing. Only watched and waited.

This, she suddenly realized, was as sexually arousing as anything could be without actually touching. The throb from her bottom heightened the pleasure. For a man to be watching while she did this… If she said nothing, would he paddle her again? Her mouth went dry. Fear awakened. No, she didn’t want to go this route. Not pain. Besides, she felt sure Theo enjoyed wielding that paddle, and she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.

“The corset,” she muttered, her head feeling like an inflating balloon from all the blood pooling in it. “I’d rather that.”

At least this way she’d be the only one feeling pleasure, and she could limit her reaction to a piece of clothing. With the paddle, Theo controlled her.

Theo nodded. He tossed the paddle onto the sofa.

Not a surprise that she’d chosen the corset. He hadn’t thought Claire ready to find enjoyment in pain. The potential was there, though. She’d liked it to a degree, despite her fear. The main aim of this was to impress on her his seriousness regarding her attitude to him and everyone around him, and one smack had achieved that aim—though the sight of her white posterior raised up high would never grow tiring. He stopped himself smiling.

He thought back to the reason for this. The sight of her attempting to shake Ericson, as if a man almost twice her weight were shakable, had been an eye-opener.

By only wounding that bear, she’d risked her life, and all because she didn’t want to kill. They’d made her murder someone…and for what? Accustoming her to death? Mind-boggling. If he could have erased that awful memory, he would have.

Still, you were the sum of your past. Without that she’d be someone different. A someone who, perhaps, wouldn’t have been appalled at the death of a bear. He’d wanted to grab her and cuddle her when he’d seen that. She was getting to be an addiction for him, far more than any other woman.

He folded his arms and tried to look stern.

The corset, despite what he’d told her, wasn’t really a punishment. Not…exactly. The afternoon should prove interesting.

Efficiently, as if it were some boring task, Claire pulled her dress over her head, breasts bouncing enticingly as the bodice caught under them. Her nipples, pink-brown and soft, peaked as she caught him looking. “I think you need a hand,” he rumbled, scooping up the corset.

“Um, I can do this.”

Her upset tone made him hold the corset up high, so she’d have to stretch to reach it.

“Theo—”

“Yes?”

She sighed and shut her eyes a moment before looking at him. “Very well.”

He tilted his head, wanting to see if she’d get the hint. “Hmm?”

Her brow wrinkled for a second. “Please, help me put it on.”

He smiled. “Ahh. That’s much better.”

On bended knee, he helped her put each foot into the corset and draw it up over the long curves of calf and thigh, his hands drifting up her body, smoothing twisted pearls and cloth at bottom, waist, and breast, clipping the catch shut at her nape, and, naturally, nibbling his way up the slope of her neck. How he adored her neck. By that time, she was leaning back into him, her hand over his at her crotch, breathing fast… He could listen all day to her panting and moaning his name. But…no. He released her, stepping aside after making sure she was balanced.

“Put on your dress, Claire. Let’s eat something.” He smacked her on the red side of her bottom, grinned at the shock on her face.

Quickly, she slipped the dress over her head and adjusted the bodice. The pearls at her neckline were barely visible.

He’d not told her of the punishment for refusing Dankyo’s order. If anything, that was the most important part. He couldn’t afford this wedge she was driving between him and Dankyo. The business needed settling as soon as possible. But one thing at a time.

Chapter Fifteen

Theo swept his arm across, pointing out structures one by one. “Engineering and Vehicle Depot, the firing range, barracks. We’ll go there first. Get your apology to Ericson and Blackman out of the way.”

“Blackman?”

“The man you stabbed with a knitting needle.” Theo started whistling, off-tune but cheerful.

“I see. I didn’t know I owed him one. But yes, guess I do.” The dress had a small bustle at the rear, with a broad bow tied over it. Apart from that and a little fussiness of satin ribbon about the bodice, the dress fabric barely registered on her skin—light and shifting easily as dandelions in a breeze. If it flipped up,
everything
would be on display—the rope of pearls running between her legs and worse things—for the farther they walked, the wetter she became. Impossible not to feel, yet she gritted her teeth and tried to ignore it.

“Uh.” She nearly squeaked as a little jolt ran through her.

Beside her, Theo ambled, unconcerned and stopping to chat with staff.

She set her shoulders. Be damned if he’d get to her. She could do this, easily, to the end of the day;
then
she’d get this off and maybe ignore him for a little while…before she succumbed to his advances. If the last day was anything to judge by, he’d want to make love to her.
Mmm.

He’d bent her over and put his fingers down there.

Her pussy ached like never before. Right, maybe
not
so easy. She sighed loudly.

“Something bothering you, dear?” Theo asked politely.

If she could have fried him on the spot with her eyes, she would have, but only for a moment; then the hard set to Theo’s mouth reminded her of the alternative to wearing this thing—the paddle. “No,” she said super sweetly. “Nothing.”

“Hmm.” He smiled back.

If I get aroused, so will he, surely. Maybe two can play this game? Maybe I can tease him?

Inside the barracks entrance, bunks lined the wall to the left. On the right, a man introduced as Dankyo’s next in command waited before a squad of ten house guards.

First in line were Blackman and Ericson. Their faces like stone, they accepted her apologies, replying gruffly, “Thank you, Miss!”

In the midst of such a stronghold of masculinity, she felt exposed.
Silly
. As if the men could know what she had on under her dress. Yet, the scent of lust and sweat seemed to carry on the air.

Barely past lunchtime and just standing still, breathing in and out, made her focus on her clit. She could map the whereabouts of every pearl down there.

“Dear,” Theo said quietly, taking her elbow, “you’ve been standing there staring at your feet for a long time. Let’s move on.”

Luckily the guards had been dismissed. She bit her lip, hoping they’d not seen her distraction.

Concentrating, she wrestled her feelings to the background. The Vehicle Depot was next.

The largest of all the outer buildings, the House Engineer’s Vehicle Depot boasted double sliding doors of burnished steel. While waiting at Theo’s side, she murmured hoarsely, “When I get this off, you’re wearing it.”

The doors parted by a few feet.

“Wouldn’t fit me, Claire.” Hand at her back, he urged her into the gap.

Landships. Two of them. Riveted steel and brass, wheels and track, stumpy funnels at the top and a large cannon swiveling in a turret at the front.
Wow.

This place was almost on a war footing. The proximity to the border—that must be it. Theo’s estate housed a quick reaction force.

A spare, tall man with gray cropped hair and a friendly face leaped down from a raised platform to the left. Past his shoulder, she saw a row of windows into a workshop. The smell of oil, boosted coal, and sulfur assailed her nose.

“Welcome, sir! And Miss!” The man advanced with his hand held out to be shaken.

“This is Henry Twine.” Theo shook Henry’s hand.

When Henry took both Claire’s hands between his, it was like being engulfed by a manic shaking machine. “Glad to meet you, Miss. What do ya think of my ladies? Delilah and Kate?”

“The landships?” She held out her hands, opening and closing them, trying to think of a compliment. “Big? Really big.” They were, at that. “Is that a Hotchkinn six-inch cannon?”

That froze him. “A six—you do know your guns, Miss. It is indeed!”

With little encouragement he showed off his ladies, pointing out features to Claire on the outside and climbing up the side of
Delilah
to lean in the square turret hole at the top. Keeping her legs together, she followed Theo up the rungs on the side.

“That down there’s the driver’s position,” Harry said. “Gunner. Navigator. Commander.”

“Let’s take her for a run,” Theo said.

“Of course, sir!”

Showed to the gunner’s seat in the bowels of the landship, Claire settled in while the engine fired up. Theo reclined in the driver’s seat. Henry raised the navigator’s periscope and shouted directions.

The rear depot doors had been fully cranked back, and the steam voltaic engine opened up to the maximum grinding speed of six knots. Sunlight flooded in through the overhead turret hatch as the vehicle growled out under the open sky.

Claire barely registered the meaning of Henry’s words or the changing of the light, for the rumbling vibrations of the landship motor had penetrated up through her metal seat and turned her lower body into orgasmic jelly.

Her nostrils widened, the metal walls dimmed to a blur, and the pearls jiggled like living creatures against her clit. Every sexual place in her body trembled with delight. She shut her eyes, clamped her mouth shut, and seconds later, came—nerves quivering, whimpering at the explosive release. All around her vanished in a seething wall of white.

Luckily, the cacophony of the engine disguised her noises. By the time
Delilah
cruised to a shuddering halt inside the depot, she was quivering yet again, despite sitting, most of the time, with her bottom an inch above the metal.

“You go first,” Theo told Henry, and the man clambered up the ladder and could be heard jumping down outside. “Was that nice?” he whispered to Claire.

“Did you do that deliberately?” she whispered back, trying not to sound like a harpy.

No answer.

Fuming, she had a foot on the first rung of the ladder when Theo slid his hand under her dress and up the back of her thigh.

“Like a hand?” he said softly, as his fingers continued on, gliding along her wet folds, until two of them slipped up inside.

Impaled, she paused, her inner muscles tightening around his fingers. “Oh.” She couldn’t move.
Mmm.

By moving his hand back, while still inside her, he reeled her to him. If she’d stayed still, his fingers would have come out. She didn’t want that. She let herself step from the ladder and be shuffled back until her body met the hard muscles of his chest. Despite the residual of her anger, the way he surrounded her made her yearn to sink into his warmth and let the rich scent of cologne and man soak into every pore in her skin.

Theo put his arm across under her breasts and held her to him. “I love seeing you aroused, though no, it didn’t occur to me that riding in Delilah would make you come. It wasn’t supposed to.” He brushed his lips along her neck, delighted when the little hairs stood up in goose bumps and pinkness suffused her skin. “I’ll make sure to write it into my memory under things to be repeated.”

He raised his voice. “Henry, go on back to your work. We’ll be here awhile!”

“Yessir!”

“Won’t he think—” she said weakly.

“Shh. Never mind Henry. I employ him, and I assure you he won’t mind if we stay and examine Delilah a bit longer…or even if I sit you down on one of these seats and make you have a dozen orgasms.”

“But, he’ll know what we’re doing,” she said, mouselike, trembling.

He laughed and nuzzled into her hair, enjoying the simple perfume of soap and woman. Her subjugation…it stirred him far more than any of the bored aristocratic ladies who’d volunteered in the past. He could have taken her right then and there, bent her over the seat, but no, not yet. She didn’t have everything sorted out in her head. He’d push her boundaries and truly see where she wanted to go.

“Perhaps, but he’s not here. Why are you angry?”

When she didn’t answer immediately, he removed his fingers, brought his hand around to the front of her thigh, then slid them back in, making her wriggle. This time his thumb could reach her clit, and he tapped it once.

“Ooh.” Her breath caught. “You know,” she said grumpily, “it’s hard to think when you do that.”

“Then I’ll stop.” And he did, only to have her press her mound up against his hand. “Uh-uh. You complained. Sit still.” Pleasingly, she did, though her thighs trembled. “Now, what’s bothering you?”

She swallowed. “This, it’s not punishment exactly, is it? I mean, I feel like you’re just showing me off as your newest toy. Your sexual plaything.”

“You’re not a toy, Claire. I don’t want to demean you. But your sexuality, it’s part of you. You’re a woman with a body that makes me dream up new things to do to it every time I see you, whether naked”—he gently curled his fingers inside her—“or clothed.”

“Everyone will think…bad things. This isn’t what well-bred men and women do in public. It’s because I’m a frankenstruct, isn’t it?”

“Ahh, it’s society’s expectations that anger you then. You do realize you’ve lumped me in with the poorly bred?” He grunted. “Look. My sexual tastes are well known. I’ve had women in my bed before, some of them aristocrats. I treated them the same way. Will anyone here think the worst of you? No. I’ve always found it simpler to have staff about me who don’t have any problems with such things.