Sweet and Dirty (7 page)

The awkward position was a new one to her body, and her muscles already complained. She’d never seen quite this cruel, efficient side of Ro. But he wouldn’t actually hurt her, would he? Not really. Even with his frightening anger, probably thinking she’d made out with another guy and accepted a marriage proposal mere days after their session in the Cage Room, Ro wouldn’t hurt her.

Impersonal hands removed her black high heels, exposing her bare feet. The nerve endings on the bottoms of her arches flickered to life as a finger drew slowly down it. Tickling. She flapped her feet in reflex, but the boards prevented further movement. She was shocked at how sensitive her feet were. Ro flicked at her heel, looking satisfied, then stepped to one side.

She was to be presented to
everyone?
She stared up at him, mutinous. In her bent-over position her cleavage was presented to passersby and her nipples pointed at a patch of floor a yard in front of her. It was humiliating.

As he’d intended. She watched the cool smile that touched his lips, and knew he could sense the direction of her thoughts.

People trailed by. Strange fingers touched her toes, stroked her arches, tickled her mercilessly. They laughed when she squirmed, so she tried not to, but she couldn’t help it. How had she never known the vulnerability of her own feet? Worse, as she shifted around, her dress rode up. Everyone could see the color of her underwear.

She gave silent, heartfelt thanks for her decision to wear silky black bikini briefs instead of a thong.

Even as her embarrassment increased with each torturer playing with her, she felt a jolt of pure lust engulf her body, as if there were a direct line from her feet to her sex. Every time Ro allowed another stranger to tease her feet, to tickle her without relief, she felt a greater measure of desire.

Ro wasn’t even participating. He only watched with an aloof expression that denied any personal connection.

That diminished her as much as her shameful response, until she had to hang her head in humiliation.

Ro immediately stepped forward. “Next punishment. Paddling, and whipping.” The guards raised the board encasing her wrists and ankles, and Lizbeth flinched as they touched her feet to help her out of the stocks. She rubbed her wrists.

Before she’d reclaimed her body sufficiently, Ro barked an order. “Stand up!”

She did, wobbling on feet that still felt too sensitive. She ground them against the wood floor and tugged the hem of her dress down as far as it would go. The eyes of dozens of strangers drilled into her. Part of her felt bashful. Another part felt exhilarated by their scrutiny. She even smiled. The guards rotated her gently in a half circle, as if turning precious artwork around for the audience’s viewing pleasure. It really wasn’t so bad.

“Bend over and grab your ankles.”

Lizbeth stiffened. She faced the back of the stage. That meant…

“Yes, your ass is going to be on display. While I paddle it. Bend over and grab your ankles. Now.”

Shame replaced her shaky confidence, but she knew she’d like less the consequences of defying Ro’s order.

She bent. Her dress hiked up again. Her hair hung down.

Ro’s tender touch on her neck made her flinch. He trailed his fingers sensuously around the base of her head, massaging her. “Good girl.”

A moment of pleasure, a moment of outrage. He’d spoken to her as if she were a dog! The crowd murmured its approval.

“I’m going to give you twenty-five strikes. If you move from this position, I will start again at one. Ready?” He was asking the audience, not her. They shouted assent.

“It’s a naughty bottom, isn’t it?” Ro caressed her ass cheeks with casual ownership. Lizbeth felt her face heat with mortification. The worst of it was that part of her leapt to his touch, reveled in the sweet warmth of his palm gliding over her silky, too-brief panties. She gulped as his hand delved slightly between her cheeks, brushed the softer mound between her legs. The sound of her breathing was loud to her, trapped inside the curtain of her hair. She thought of all the people watching what he did. Thank god she was wearing underwear.

“I think these panties should go, don’t you?”

She made an outraged sound and tried to wriggle away from him, but he’d anticipated her. One arm snaked down, whip quick, pinioning her to her original position. The other hand peeled her panties down, exactly as low as last time: enough to reveal her cheeks but not so much to show what lay between them. There was that, at least; her legs were together.

For the moment. She whimpered, afraid of the consequences of using language, or moving too much, beginning to feel like the dog he addressed. “Down, girl. Settle down. That’s right, you’re fine, this is what you want. Isn’t it, Lizbeth?”

Yes. It is
. Part of her did. And in response to his affectionate, knowing, honeyed voice, all she wanted to do was to please him. Then they could talk. Then they could straighten—

Whack
. “One!” The crowd counted.

The stinging pain was immediate.

Whack
. “Two!” The sound was harsh on her ears, the leather-covered paddle slapping bare flesh high and sharp and very personal.

“Three! Four! Five!” Her bottom began to feel hot. Then itchy, cool, then hotter. He increased the tempo. And strength. She couldn’t help moving. She wriggled away from the fiery hurt, moving her hands from her ankles for a moment, uncomfortable.

“Tsk, tsk. Have to start again at one.”

Whack
. “One!”

As the blows rained down, her bottom heated further. She tried to lessen the sting, but knew that within her limited position the movement only made her ass wiggle as if she craved more. She was on fire. She felt another crush of mortification as cool air caressed her ass and her mound. Ro had paused, reminding her how she was in full, air-circulated view of the public. Then the paddle fell on her right thigh, then her left, then higher. And on the other side. Then five strikes quick and hard, not giving her a chance to recover. It was unbearable.

She became aware of the sound of her moaning only when he stopped. “Very good. You may stand. For the moment.”

Hearing the rough passion in his voice, she felt a spike of lust. Her bottom and upper thighs felt as if she’d had a bad sunburn, and tinglingly alive when she pulled her panties back up.

“You’ve been very bad,” Ro said. Was that a lustful edge in his voice? Was he as inflamed inflicting this violence as she was receiving it? If so, it was not in evidence by the time he spoke again. “And you will endure the remainder of your punishment without your panties. Take them off now.”

L
izbeth opened her mouth to refuse.

Ro raised a bored eyebrow, as if her refusal would be utterly predictable. His lips curved upward in a tight smile.

She closed her mouth. Though she wasn’t sure how on earth she could bring herself to “take them off,” as he’d ordered. All she knew was that she didn’t want to leave before she’d had a chance to talk with him. But take off her underwear? She looked her quandary at him.

“You can,” he answered her, moving only his mouth. “You will.”

Then, “Or, I will. You won’t like the way I do it, though.”

She gave him a poisonous look. Then, trying to ignore the audience, and keeping her dress pulled firmly down with one hand, she wriggled her panties off. Then kicked them to him. Ro scooped them up with one graceful lunge and steered her toward another part of the stage. She moved as if in a trance, the familiar warmth of his hand on her a link to their previous intimacy. Didn’t he remember? Wasn’t their connection still there?

“Good, they’ve prepared the bench.”

Lizbeth halted immediately, but he was prepared and scooped her up much the same way he had her panties.

The feel of being held against his warm broad chest evoked more memories. She hid her face against him, breathing in his now-familiar scent. This was like her worst nightmare and her best fantasy combined. The only thing that could make it better was if Ro cared about her in a meaningful way. That was what she needed to talk to him about. She needed to get this “submissive” business out of the way, and then confess her growing feelings for him. They could have something really special, she knew. All that remained was to find out whether he felt the same way.

He was actually going to put her over a bench again? Would he mount her again, too? She laughed silently, feeling a little hysterical. He felt her movement.

“This amuses you?” He dropped her feet, setting her down with a jolt. “We’ll see how amused you are when you’re wiggling on all fours locked to the bitch hitch. That’s what we call it here. You can see why.”

She could. Though she’d expected something like it, this device he meant for her had tie points. She’d be locked to it. She shook her head, tried to back away.

“Oh no, you don’t.” Ro signaled the guards, and in a short time she was on all fours, her midsection supported by foam-covered straps, her wrists affixed together and dangling similarly from a steel crosspipe above, and her knees forced apart with a spreader bar. She tried to close her legs and failed. A sense of ultimate vulnerability cascaded over her, titillating and frightening. Humiliating. Delightful. She could only give small thanks that Ro’s bitch hitch faced the side wall rather than the audience, and that only he could see her spread crotch.

“We can’t forget the muzzle.” She jerked away from the vinyl muzzle that dropped down in front of her face like a gas mask. But the grinning guard tilted her head up with one hand and placed it over her head, inserted the anatomically correct protruding gag into her mouth, then tightened the straps.

“I assume you remember how to give your safe word when your mouth is occupied? Why don’t you show me.”

Lizbeth lifted one finger at him. It wasn’t her thumb.

The audience gasped.

Ro touched her face with gentle respect. She could swear she saw humor and affection in his eyes, but when he spoke his voice was cold as doom. “This criminal wants a thorough, vigorous, severe punishment.” He lifted a long, thin crop from where it nestled in its own crevice on the rack, sinking down to a working position on his knees, leaving Lizbeth and the rack in profile view of the audience.

Silence reigned.

Lizbeth held her breath. Her whole body clenched, dread and exhilaration a whirlpool threatening to engulf her.

A hiss split the air and a line of fire exploded on her cheeks. Her body tried to jump to safety, but the restraints caught her, swung her back to him. He whipped her again. And again. Sweet sharp pain licked at tender flesh already heated by the paddle. This time the audience merely watched. Their deep quiet struck her as fascinated, almost respectful.

Suddenly she felt a large hand on her thigh, the side hidden from viewers. Ro’s free hand. It encased her leg in a rough grip, holding her still. His fingertips wormed up her thigh, burrowed between her cleft. He stroked her where she was most sensitive. As the whip rained down on her and her body lunged, his hand pressed her back into position as his fingers worked cleverly between her legs. Despite the blows that threatened to split her skin, all her awareness went to his fingers.

He moved the whip’s attentions to the right cheek alone, beating there until she whimpered. Then he chastised the left, the dual action of his flicking finger ripping moans out of her. By the time he marked her lower cheeks with a skillful pattern, making sure every inch was well attended to, she nearly vibrated with the peaks she almost reached. Pleasure alternating with pain had her feeling floaty, sustained at the moment before orgasm, indefinitely. Every time the whip touched already torched flesh she cried out wordlessly around her gag. The combination of sensations was too intense to endure, and tears sprung into her eyes. She had to be bleeding, with the brutal whipping he gave. But with his fingers positioned as they were, she didn’t want him to stop. But he had to stop.

A kind of fever threatened to incinerate her. She screamed around the gag, at the limit of her endurance.

Ro stopped. He flipped the quick-release of the spreader bar and the restraints. She heard him breathing too quickly as he stuffed the whip back into its holder.

When her hands were free and her knees bent more modestly, he finally removed the gag from her mouth. She looked up at him, feeling the coolness on her face from the tears. She held herself immobile, silent and waiting.

“This is too intense for your level of experience.” Wherever his gaze touched her, it seared her as surely as the whip. Entranced by the look in his eyes, she wanted him so badly she shook.

“Her punishment is complete,” Ro announced. Applause thundered. She wondered if anyone else heard the unsteadiness in his voice.

Then his words penetrated and she wondered whether he was joking.

“You’re just…that’s it?” That couldn’t be it. Not when all she wanted was to wrap her legs around him and fill herself with him again. He had to satisfy her this time. He had to finish. She arched back against him. He gripped her, stilled her.

“Not now. I can’t. I have to…I have work to do.”

“I
am
your work.”

“You’re not.” His voice was like a whip crack. “If you were my work, that would make me a pornographer, wouldn’t it? Or maybe a pimp.”

She recoiled, hurt. She hid it from Ro. “Only if you do it for commerce instead of love.” She yanked free of him. “I guess you’ve chosen.”

Then, to make her point, she stabbed back at him with one pointed finger to his chest. “I don’t know what I was thinking to come here tonight. I should just let Ted take me—”

Back to Alabama
, she was going to say, but Ro turned his back on her. He was gesturing to the two guards who’d held her, over by the other convicts waiting to be judged. He was having her thrown out? Her heart sank. Maybe she’d been too aggressive.

He was speaking to the masked female dom. One of his actions suddenly seized her full attention. He was handing the dom his judge robes! Lizbeth heard his clipped words. “Take over. I have urgent business.”

“Uh-huh. I saw her poking you.” She turned her masked face to Lizbeth, and seemed sincerely concerned. “Girl, are you insane?”

Lizbeth remembered her earlier kindness. She managed a smile for the dominatrix and a shrug of her stiff shoulders. “Just trying to get his attention.”

“I’d say you got it. And now you’re going to get more. Maybe more than you can handle.” Her voice and mannerisms seemed familiar to Lizbeth.

“One can only hope,” Lizbeth quipped. She was going to get more! In truth, she felt her body coming more alive than ever, her mind seeming to float above it somewhere in a sensual cloud of anticipation. Maybe he’d punish her again.

The dominatrix laughed.

Ro nodded his dismissal. His face a mask of disapproval, he directed the guards to Lizbeth. “She raised her hand against me.”

The guards looked at her in disbelief, but immediately clamped her upper arms in identical, almost painfully firm grips.

“The Cage Room.”

Lizbeth felt a touch of unease as they marched her back. People stared, but there was sympathy mixed with their curiosity now. Others watched with sadistic excitement. Evidently the Cage Room was a big deal.

She felt a frisson of excitement skitter up and down her spine.

She heard Vivian’s husky voice beginning to read the next criminal’s offenses as the heavy wood door closed, sealing the four of them off from all but the low bass thump of the nightclub’s music.

Lizbeth moved slightly, testing. She felt the two guards grip her more tightly. Otherwise they stood as silent and still as statues, obedient to Ro.

“I was mistaken about your tolerances, wasn’t I? You want more. If I’m wrong, all you have to do is say your safe word.”

His expression was drawn, ascetic. His mouth was a hard, cruel line. “Lay her down. No, not on the carpeted area, on the mat. That’s all she deserves.”

The guards kicked her feet out from under her and lay her on the black, rubber-matted floor. She could feel the nightclub bass directly in her spine. Fear bloomed in her, with the suspicion of what he intended. With others there, watching?

She struggled. The two men spread her arms apart, though, holding her upper body down.

Ro wouldn’t.

An impossible surge of desire chased the fear around inside her body, and then was chased in turn, like a couple of dogs playing dominance games. Sensuality warring with sensibility. Submissive versus rebellious. And wasn’t that all it was? Dominance games? Was everything just a game? She wasn’t sure anymore where fantasy ended and reality began. She tested the guards’ grip again, making a small desperate sound.

Ro smiled, and she couldn’t miss the heat in his eyes. “You have my permission to struggle. To fight. To scream. No one will hear you.”

As if part of her was waiting for his permission, she kicked out with her legs.

Ro caught one, placed it forcefully back down. “Naughty,” he breathed. He shoved his other hand up under her skirt.

“No,” she protested.

But his hands worked their magic. They reminded her how his fingers felt, of the sensuality they could evoke with the lightest touch.

He wasn’t touching her lightly anymore. Back between her legs they went, doing things that made her scream in denial of what he was making her feel. He thumbed her expertly, and she twisted, whimpering, humiliated that others witnessed the things Ro was doing to her.

And her response to it.

She wriggled away from him, her lower body rising half off the mat and twisting desperately, but he slammed her back down. “Hold her tight. She won’t mind some Indian burns on the wrist. Will you, Lizbeth?”

His eyes had darkened to black. His lips curled in an unconscious snarl. “Maybe she wouldn’t mind if you had a piece of her, too.”

Her muscles strained, trying to close her legs, but he forced them apart. Would he really let them have her? Her mind shrieked protest even as her psyche reveled in his thorough dominance of her. She wanted no one but him. She could always say her safe word, she knew, and clung to the idea until his next touch obliterated thought.

A whisper of sticky latex, and her dress was shoved upward. Through blurred vision she saw Ro’s cock standing erect, thick and long as a stallion’s. Before she could object, he placed it at her opening and shoved into her with a grunt.

She screamed, in relief as much as shock at what he’d done. Her cheeks ground against the rubber, the pain from his earlier paddling and whipping blazing to life. The pleasure of finally being filled by him, pounded so ruthlessly on the ground while she struggled against the assault…pain and pleasure and the incomparable degradation of it…It was exquisite!

Ro used her brutally, and she reveled in the combined sensations. Waves of ecstasy throbbed through her as she orgasmed again and again.

Desperate cries for him to stop broke from her lips. “I can’t…this is too…please stop!”

He gave those same lips a bruising kiss before whispering in her ear, “Not unless you use your safe word. But you don’t want to do that, do you?” She met his eyes, and she couldn’t lie. She shook her head, the blazing pleasure spiking her with each thrust he made. She surrendered to it, feeling diminished and transported at the same time. She endured the shameful pleasure he gave her.

Almost immediately, another orgasm ripped through her with an intensity that had her lunging mindlessly against the restraining hands.

He reached his in the next moment, his lips curved into a snarl. She half expected him to bite her, and just the thought of it sent another ripple of ecstasy all through her body.

She lay, limp and uncaring in the afterglow. She closed her eyes.

Ro tugged her dress down. “Good job. Now, please leave,” he told the guards. She felt hands release her wrists, leaving behind a tingling soreness that she knew would become bruises. She smiled.

“You got what you wanted,” Ro observed. She opened her eyes. Clothed, it was almost as if he hadn’t just forced her. They could be back at the beginning, when she was asking him for lessons. God, he was handsome, with that satisfied, cruel look of his.

“I did,” she drawled. “And so did you.”

“Yes.” A pause. “How will your fiancé feel about all this?”

Lizbeth closed her eyes again, smiling. “I tried to tell you. He’s not. He’s just an ex who wants me back.”

Ro was silent for another long moment. “And do you want him too?”

“No. He seems to have a problem with my learning how to be dominant.”

“Umm.” Ro was uncharacteristically quiet. She opened her eyes, met his evaluating stare. “I worked you over pretty good.”

Was that pride in his voice? Lizbeth grinned. “I could try to return the favor. Didn’t you say this is how a bottom learns the ropes?”