Sexy as Hell Box Set (74 page)

“No.” I reached for her face, lunging forwards in the water as I held her cheeks. “You’re forgetting, you’re changing history to suit yourself. You submitted to me and you bloody loved it. You wore my collar, you even took that collar to Tuscany. Hell, you no doubt have it here, in your case.”

She glanced away towards the bedroom, and I knew she did indeed have it.

“You liked handing yourself over to me,
” I went on, “even if it was just for a few hours or a scene. You liked—”

“Okay, shut the fuck up. Yes, I’ll admit it, I liked it. I liked how you were with me.”

I nodded slowly. “Thank you, that was all I wanted, for you to admit that it had worked, that it hadn’t just been me who’d hit an absolute high from that.”

Her eyes narrowed, and she gazed
intently at me. Then she tipped forward, touched her lips to mine and ran her hands down my chest. “I got high all right,” she said onto my mouth. “When you shoved a vibrator high into my arse and then plunged your cock high into my pussy. Oh, yes, that was mind-blowing. Turns me on just thinking about it.” She slipped her touch lower, over my belly and then around my cock.

“Zara.” I tensed, her small hand on me creating an instant need to come.

“Shh, Victor. Give me this. Let me control your orgasm, and if you do, I’ll tell you something you might be able to give me that will help us understand each other better.” She slid her hand up and down, root to tip. Delved deeper with her other hand and cupped my balls.

I kept hold of her face, still
palming her cheeks. “Tell me now, what I can do to help you. You know I’ll do it.”

“Come first.”

“But, oh, Jesus…”

She’d slipped her finger over my anus, probing just a little. Damn, the woman just went for it, and she knew exactly which buttons to press.

I squeezed my eyes shut, fought for control. “Tell me, what can I do?”

“Come.” She kissed me. “Come, Victor, come for your Mistress.”

She was working me fast, her grip firm and steady. My balls were packing tight, pressure mounting. The water was sploshing and rocking around her fast-moving arm.

“No,” I managed. “Tell me first what you need from me.” I couldn’t back up my words with actions. I was rocking my hips into her hold, loving the tight circle she’d made around my cock.

She caught my bottom lip in her teeth, bit it, a sharp nip that made me groan, and as she did so she slid her finger up my arse.

“Ah, fuck
,” I groaned. She’d hit my hot-spot, and the point of no return had been reached. Cum burst up my shaft, a heated trail of bliss releasing in great spurts.

“Ah, ah, yes,” I panted, pleasure mixing with frustration. I was such a pushover; how did I ever think I’d be able to master her?

A handjob, a finger up my arse, a wicked kiss and I was hers.

I may as well accept it.
She had me right where she wanted me.

I gasped for breath,
hot now, and stared at the smug look on her face.

She wriggled her still buried finger, and the need to roll my eyes back in my sockets was almost overwhelming, but I fought it, just.

“Victor,” she whispered.

“What?” I said, sucking in oxygen and letting an orgasmic tremor roll through my body.

“When I was in that shed, one of the things I let them do to me was awful. It wasn’t painful, it was just humiliating, and I need you to do it to me again.”

That snapped me out of my climactic haze. “What? Why the hell would you want that?”

“Because I need to fight that demon.” She pulled her finger out, took my deflating cock in both of her hands, held it like she was soothing it, caressing it.

“But, what was it?” A whole host of possibilities galloped through my mind, but I knew it was probably none of them. Zara’s unpredictability was the most predictable thing about her.

“I’ll tell you,” she said, “when you pour me another glass of that half-decent champagne.”

I reached for the champagne and then let cool drips run from its glossy surface into the ice bucket. I didn’t need to do that, but I was biding my time, un
sure what to say to Zara. I mean, how severely had her time in the shed affected her? I could only surmise it had shaped her to the woman she was now, unable to express her emotions—the real, deep-meaning ones that the majority of the human race were able to translate without hassle. What if she asked me to do something I felt couldn’t? I’d still feel I’d have to in order to help her to heal.

And I couldn’t deny her that. Couldn’t deny her anything.

“What was it?” I asked again, eventually pouring the required champagne. I wondered if she needed the alcohol to get through, Dutch courage as it were. I handed her the glass.

“Thank you.” She drank greedily, draining the lot.

“More?” I held the bottle out.

“Please.”

She tilted her glass towards me, and I refilled, watching her as I blindly reached out to put the bottle back in the bucket. This time she sipped, leant back against the bath and closed her eyes. The base of the glass sat in the water, bubbles obscuring it, and I likened them to Zara herself, partially hidden. I knew what was below the surface even though I couldn’t see it. Her base. Who she really was.

I mimicked her position and waited.

“I said they did some awful things to me,” she said. “And they did. At the time it was horrible, devastating.” She sighed. “But Geoffrey, for all his faults, taught me that what may have been horrendous once upon a time can be pleasurable at another. I agree with him, although I wonder, in my case, whether I’m so messed up from it all that I use sex as a way of fighting what they did as well as using it to teach myself it wasn’t so bad.” Another sigh, still with her eyes closed. “I can’t explain it—it’s like if I have lots of sex, want it all the time, and I’m in control of what happens, I’m making the things in the shed seem okay, a part of me.”

I frowned, trying to work out what she’d meant. I thought I knew. If she did the same things as she’d done with them and was all right with it, felt okay and got pleasure from it, those things could no longer bother her.

I went to open my mouth, to ask questions, but refrained.

“Anyway,” she said, “at the time, back when I was eighteen and hadn’t done much excep
t French kiss a few lads and have fumbling hands up my top, the things they told me to do, things they did to me, were so extreme. Now?” She laughed, tipping her head back, balancing her neck on the lip of the bath. “Now they’re what I class as normal—I’ve done far worse.”

I couldn’t resist asking, “So have you done this particular thing since?”

“No.”

“I see.
So will you tell me what it is?”

“I will, and then we’ll go through the whole argument of you saying you can’t possibly do it, and I’ll say you can, and you’ll say you can’t…” She smiled slightly.

“As long as I’m not hurting you for the sake of it, I think I can manage just about anything you ask me to do.”
Please let that be the case…

“So if I tell you to
demand I lick your arsehole and act like a dog while doing it, you’ll be fine with that?”

Christ. Would I? I cleared my throat, resisted caressing her legs under the water. “I think I could do that.”

“And you’d have to say horrible things to me. You know, to take me right back to that time, make me think I’m there again so I can see myself, watch it from an older woman’s perspective. Know that it isn’t so bad.”

“But it must have been bad for you to be so affected the way you have been
by it.”

“Of course it was.
I wasn’t to know at that age that rimming someone can be a good thing. A nice thing.” She lifted her hand to move a lock of her hair from her forehead.

“Some people don’t ever try it,” I said. “Some people”—I laughed a bit—“don’t do many things until they’re much older.” I thought of what Zara had taught me. At one time I’d seen them as disgusting, totally wrong, gross and warped. Yet they weren’t, not when I’d done them with her.

The dog collar also sprang to mind.

“Do you think that’s why,” I asked, “in the summerhouse at Geoffrey’s, what with it resembling a shed and whatnot, you
let me put that dog collar on you?”

She laughed lightly. “Ah, you should have been a therapist, Victor. A hidden part of me recalled that episode, for want of a better word, where I was expected to act like an animal. And then there was Helen, wasn’t there, being led around on her hands and knees with a leash on, in Geoffrey’s playroom. So yes, I imagine you’re quite right. It woke some
dormant memories, even though I wasn’t aware of it, and to make sure I was still in control, I maybe let you put the collar on, because at that point I was choosing to wear something a dog would, not being forced.”

I kind of regretted asking her that now. The collar, at least to me, had been significant in another way. I’d thought she was showing me that she didn’t mind literally being collared—to me, as my sub.

“And before you ask,” she said, “because I swear I can hear your mind churning, yes, the collar meant something else too—the thing you want it to have meant.”

I felt ridiculous at being so relieved, then berated myself for being so selfish. So what if the collaring had been her way of coping with her past—so long as it had got her through, what did it matter?

It mattered a great deal to me. We’d turned a corner in that summerhouse, and I didn’t want to think our time there had been about anything else but us. Sadly, I had to admit that hadn’t been the case for Zara.

“Good,” I said.

While she sat up and sipped her champagne, eyes still closed, I took a moment to imagine what the hell I’d have felt like had I been in her position at eighteen. Taken away from my life and locked in a shed. Asked to perform like a dog and lick some bloke’s arse. I’d have been a wreck once I got away from them, and admired her for pulling through the way she had. Did her promiscuity before she’d met me also point to that time?

She was far stronger than I’d ever given her credit for.

“I’m glad the collaring meant something more to you than…than you getting a handle on the past,” I said. “Glad, actually, that it served two purposes. If I’d known back then what you’d been through, I don’t think I’d have even gone into the summerhouse. Just what it resembled alone must have been terribly hard for you. I would definitely not have let my beast out and mastered you in there.” I recalled what we’d done, what I’d done to her. How I’d slapped her face as she’d come. “Christ, Zara, I acted no differently to how they had. I’m sorry.”

She opened her eyes and stared at me. “Don’t you ever compare yourself to them, do you hear me?
Ever.
You’re
nothing
like them. I
wanted
what we did in that summerhouse—there’s a bloody big difference. And it helped—a lot—what we did. I got so much negativity out of my head without even realising it.” She closed her eyes again. Leant back. “I didn’t consciously think about that time, see? I didn’t even know what was going on in the deeper parts of my mind. I’d blocked it all out—safer that way—yet my subconscious had a system of helping me to deal with it gradually, without
me
having to outright deal with it. Do you understand?”

“I think I do, yes.”

“So you’ll do this for me? Role play, pretend you’re the meanest bastard on the planet? Force me to do what I said? I need you to do this, and if there’s one person in the world I trust more than any other it’s you.”

“What if…?” I wasn’t sure I could voice it, but it was something that had to be said. “Zara, you know how men…” Shit, I should just come right out with it. “You know how men get erections…”

That small smile returned. “You’re worried you might enjoy it, that you’ll get a hard-on.”

I nodded. “Yes.”

“I’m not worried about that—
won’t
be worried about it. I’ll be thinking of something else entirely. Facing…stuff.”

Of course she would, and how selfish of me yet again to have thought about myself like that. “Right, well, do you want me to do it in the bath?”

“No.” She sat up again, opened her eyes and drank her remaining champagne while eyeing me over her glass. “You know this place pretty well, don’t you?”

I frowned. “I do, yes.”

“So you’d know where we could go. Where a shed might be.”

Oh fuck, she meant to go the whole hog on this. I shouldn’t have been surprised—this
was
Zara, after all—yet I was. I raised my eyebrows. “Um, I suspect I could find one somewhere, yes. Might not be a typically English wooden one, though.”

“Good,” she said, getting out of the tub and putting her glass on the
tray with the ice bucket. “Then that’s what we’ll do.” She grabbed a towel from a rail and began drying herself briskly. “We’ll get dressed, and you’ll take me to a shed, and on the way I’ll tell you exactly what you have to say, what you have to do. And,” she stared at me with those piercing eyes of hers, “you mustn’t stop until I tell you to—until I’ve got rid of my demons.”

“But what if…?”

“It’ll be all right, you’ll see. Under no circumstances must you stop until I give the word.” She held the towel to her breasts. “I have to get this shit out of me, understand? I have to make it all go away for good. Geoffrey managed to help me get rid of some, the smaller things, but I never asked him to help with the more…difficult scenes.”

She looked up at the ceiling. She seemed like she was praying for guidance to a God that she might well think had deserted her. Did she even have faith? Her quips about Jesus not helping me, whenever I muttered his name, made me think she didn’t. And I couldn’t blame her for that.

“All right,” I said, getting out of the bath then wrapping a towel around my middle. “But I need to think on where I could take you. Venice isn’t your typical location for sheds.”

“Oh, I’m sure you’ll come up with something.” She lowered her head and glanced at me, smiled, then continued drying. “You’re a resourceful kind of man.”

Resourceful, yes, but outright mean? I’d have to be. It didn’t sit well, but shit, I’d have to be.

I went up to her, stilled her hands and drew her to me so our bodies were flush. “I want you to know I’m only doing this because—”

“Yes, yes,” she said, nodding. “Because you love me. I know that, know exactly why you’re doing it. And I’m bloody grateful, believe me.”

“I don’t want your gratitude, I just want everything to be okay. I want
you
to be okay.” I stroked her cheek, held her other in my palm. Wanted to kiss her senseless so she forgot everything for a few moments.

We stared at
each other for what seemed an eternity.

Her eyes glistened, and she turned away to stare at the bath. “Oh, would you look at that?”

“What?” I asked, keeping my gaze on her.

“We forgot to pull the plug.”

She moved away from me, busied herself with the task of letting the water out. I didn’t have to ask why. I’d have probably done the same in her shoes—keeping occupied to stop myself getting emotional just before going through something that would wrench out a slew of terrible memories and feelings.

I dried myself as she
swooshed fresh water from the tap around the bath, and I wondered if she’d continue until all the bubbles were gone. I sensed she needed a minute or two by herself—me constantly hovering when she had things on her mind probably wasn’t too nice—and left the bathroom to get out a fresh set of clothing. As I dressed, I went through our location in my head, coming up blank. I hadn’t seen garden sheds here on my previous visits because, well, the Venetian’s weren’t exactly big on gardens, but a little wooden hut or building that would be empty and somewhere we could go to perform a sex act could work. There had to be something like that about.

I moved over to the window and stared out at the darkening skyline now doused in shadows. Heard Zara pad out of the bathroom and decided to wait for a few minutes before I turned around. Give her some privacy to get dressed. But she came up behind me and, uncharacteristically for her, put her arms around my middle, linked her fingers, then rested her cheek on my back. I raised my eyebrows in surprise yet didn’t say a word. If I brought attention to her actions, she might never repeat them. And I knew, without her needing to say, that she was frightened. Yes, the
bolshy, big-mouthed Zara was frightened of what was ahead and she needed a bit of comfort.

I didn’t believe for one minute that she couldn’t love me like I wanted her to. Not now, not when she was holding me like this and shaking a bit. She just needed encouraging, that was all. She needed lessons in how to be dated, how to be treated. Her whole experience and perspective of how man meets woman had to be changed, learnt from scratch, because fucking hell, those lads had denied her the chance to start her adult life normally
. They’d taken away the innocence of a young woman just stepping out into the world.

If I had the chance and
I’d get away with it, I’d kill the sons of bitches.