Under the Lash (9 page)

That jarred Cassie out of her ecstatic reverie and back into the present, and the fact that she was, after all, over his lap, and very little good – as far as she could tell – ever came from that – case in point.

He did manage to surprise her, though, because unlike her previous punishments, he established – almost calculatedly, it seemed – no discernable rhythm to the forceful swats he delivered to her behind. She never had any idea when one was going to land, and he very successfully managed to completely occupy her mind and flood her body with unfathomable pleasure by wiggling and rubbing and flicking that middle finger – and soon his index finger, also – over that vulnerable little spot of hers.

That was until the exact second when his palm came in contact with her butt again. And then she found herself inundated with much less pleasurable sensations that pulled her away from the sensual web he was constructing, making her mind automatically tamp down her body’s headlong response and causing a natural delay in her journey towards the ultimate fulfillment.

But then he began very skillfully mingling the two and succeeded much more so than she would have preferred at blurring the lines between pain and pleasure, so much so that, near the end, she was so mindless and lost about which way to turn that she found herself moaning in exactly the same way, whether she was being spanked or stroked.

And when Anjel heard that, he knew he had won.

He continued to do exactly what he’d begun doing, although he did increase the speed in both areas of her body that he knew were now quite fully under his control. Still no discernable pattern to the tremendous swats, but they came much more quickly as his fingers delved down – one last time, he thought, if he was judging the quality of her moans correctly. His fingers bathed in her slick juices as they ventured back up and settled right where he knew she most wanted them to.

Because he knew she was close, he slowed down the speed of his fingers slightly, making her wait just that much longer for her culmination simply by the judicious application of his hand to her flaming seat. But it was getting rapidly to the point where she was going to fly well beyond any control he could exert over her, although he dragged it out as long as he could. Eventually, though, he could hear the groan begin at the back of her throat, and then he left off spanking her but continued to swish his fingers up and over that tightly swollen nub, showing no mercy and literally flinging her into her very first orgasm.

She bucked and writhed and did her best to get away from him, despite the searing ecstasy that was flowing throughout her body, radiating from exactly that point where he was furiously rubbing her, but although he couldn’t control some aspects of her flight to paradise, he could assure that he had unlimited access to her, and one well placed leg kept her from being able to move enough to dislodge him until he felt she had a full measure of her woman’s pleasure.

Within his strong embrace as he arranged her up against him under the light sheet, Cassie was panting and heaving and moaning and doing all of the things her mother had impressed upon her that young ladies do not do, most especially in front of members of the opposite sex. Yet he had so clearly driven her to this point – to this...whatever it was where her mind and her body flew away with any shred of intelligence she ever owned and she became no better than the wild animal she had been comparing him to in her mind not five minutes ago.

Her lower body throbbed, and it was only partly because of the spanking she’d received. In fact, her butt hurt very little in comparison to the front of her where his hand had been. Despite what had felt like some sort of resolution to all of those white hot feelings he had conjured within her, it felt...heavy and inconsolably achy, although whatever ecstatic spasms he had driven her to had taken some of the edge off.

But not all, she was dismayed to realize when she noticed that her hands had wandered down to hover just above her privates of their own accord, as if they needed to soothe that strange feeling themselves although the idea was entirely preposterous. A lady never touched herself down there except for reasons of personal cleanliness.

Unfortunately, the Captain had followed her line of sight until he realized the same thing she had – that she was about to take over his job herself. But she immediately found herself wrapped tightly up against him, his arms holding hers in place at her sides. “None of that, Cassie. You had better never let me find you touching yourself, girl, or you’ll learn what regret really means.”

As if she wasn’t already an unbecoming red all over already from the deeply embarrassing things that he insisted on doing to her, and having her do to him, that remark still succeeded in deepening her blush.

But Anjel wasn’t willing to let her get away with just a nod on something he considered important. He wanted to hear her accept his command out loud, believing it would help her obey. “Repeat the rule I just gave you.”

Cassie was certain she was going to die of shame before she was even able to begin that sentence, but his two big hands on her flaming butt helped urge her on. “I’m not to...to...touch m–myself, Sir,” she whispered, barely intelligible, and received a chastising swat because of it that she was mortified to realize made her lower body clench with nearly the same level of sensual enjoyment as she had had during that long culmination of ecstatic spasms.

“Speak up, girl,” he warned.

“I– I’m not to t–touch m–myself, Sir,” she said, more loudly but to his sternum.

Another crack against her defenseless bottom, and the same disturbing response from her body. “Look me in the eye, Cassandra, and tell me what your newest rule is. And don’t make me ask you again.”

Biting her lip, but deeply afraid not to obey him, her eyes crept to those warm but cruel blue ones as she said very clearly, and without hesitation. “I’m not to touch myself, Sir.”

“Good girl.” He kissed her forehead and cuddled her even closer. “You’re a very special girl, you know. Not many women have the ability to enjoy a good, thorough chastisement the way you do. It’s a very special talent, indeed.”

He couldn’t fathom the stricken look she adopted upon hearing those words, and worse yet, why she immediately began to keen as if he had taken the whip he used on the men to her backside, not that the idea hadn’t occurred to him, particularly when she was being especially irksome.

But Cassie was horrified at the pronouncement that he had just made about her character, and how she knew her body supported his theory. It made her sound as if she was just like her mother – apt to give herself to a man – any man, if her mother’s recent choice was taken into consideration – and deliberately put herself into a situation where she was going to be physically chastised for the carnal pleasure of it.

She absolutely refused to be that way.

And yet he had just proven that she was
exactly
like that. He had added yet another layer of considerable discomfort to her bottom – when it was already in tatters, as far as she was concerned – and had made her enjoy it most thoroughly. Indeed, he had gotten her to the point where an extremely painful smack to her behind elicited the same response as if his finger was still stroking that strange spot he’d found on her body, that was, as far as she knew, the main source of carnal delights.

But apparently not the only one, for her.

Unable to deal with what she’d discovered about herself and feeling utterly defeated for the first time since she’d been taken captive, Cassie surrendered completely, allowing her body to go limp. She didn’t care if he spanked her again, she didn’t care if he killed her right now, if the truth be told, regardless of how sinful the thought was. She just couldn’t cope.

Anjel felt her go limp against him, and took it as a sign of exhaustion, which was completely understandable, considering the circumstances.

“Now you’ve had an eventful couple of days,” he whispered, pressing his lips to her forehead in an oddly tender act, “and I think you best get some sleep.”

Cassie’s mind was as blank as she could make it, but she would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that, after what had just happened to her – and had been happening all day – that there was no way she was going to fall asleep.

But she was snoring delicately in his arms within a matter of minutes.

***

The Captain kept her cloistered in his quarters, where the only other person she saw for nearly a week was Rory, and him only occasionally. Not enough to – as she had originally hoped – try to persuade him somehow to assist her in escaping, especially since the two of them were always thick as thieves, obviously long and close good friends.

Dammit.

Luckily for her, he did – as he’d said before – have a ship to run, and it occupied a fair amount of his time. Not that she got off scot free by any stretch of the imagination, unfortunately. Although he had said that she would only be spanked at bedtime that turned out to be too much to hope for. He spanked her any time she’d done anything he didn’t want her to do, or – especially – if she took too much time in obeying an order. Although she would have thought he might have eased up on her some over the past week or so, her bottom was never
not
a vivid shade of red due to his frequent ministrations, but he would have said that if she had behaved herself, she wouldn’t have found herself over his lap quite so often.

And he molested her more often than he disciplined her. Cassie wasn’t at all sure what to make of this, and she wanted to hate every minute of the time his hands spent roaming possessively over her body. But she couldn’t. He seemed to be able to coax her flesh to do his bidding with very little effort on his part, as if her body recognized him as its master in a way that she abhorred but she knew he preferred.

He was quite restrained, though, when it came to her recovery from innocence, for which she was both surprised and grateful. He hadn’t required her to participate in that strange ritual where he invaded her body with his, although that hadn’t kept him from fondling her at every possible turn, and requiring her to do the same to him.

One such lesson found her naked on his lap – as he preferred her to be when he was in residence – while he sat equally nude beneath her. Only he hadn’t allowed her to face him this time. Instead, he had arranged a full length mirror – of surprisingly good quality, she had noted absently at the time, calculating the cost for such an item to be quite enormous – directly in front of them. And once he regained his seat, he arranged her over him in the manner he found most pleasing, her back to his front, with each of her thighs draped over a huge arm of his big comfy chair, whose broad arms forced her to display herself even more widely than she might. Then he put her hands on those arms, too, but well back, giving her strict instructions that she was not to move her hands from the spots where he had placed them.

At first, Cassie did the only thing she could do to relieve herself of the mortifying sight of herself on such obscene display to both of them and had turned her head away while squeezing her eyes shut, appalled at the idea of watching him molest her. But of course he couldn’t allow that. In fact, he had ordered her to meet his eyes in the mirror until he told her otherwise.

And she soon found, to her complete dismay and humiliation, that the deep ache he was able to conjure within her at a moment’s whim surged double and triple fold when she was forced to watch those shameful things being done to herself, to watch his big, dark hands coming up from behind her to capture each breast, squeezing each generous globe once, very hard, until she cried out, then pseudo soothing her by pinching and twisting the pebble hard buds at their crests.

Anjel had quickly found that although she enjoyed a lighter, more delicate and teasing touch on her nipples, what really had her writhing was a somewhat harsher treatment, with only occasional feather light caresses after he had set those buds to throbbing.

And as a reward for his careful and quick study of her likes and dislikes in bed sport, she arched and moaned as if at his command as he made those swollen bits hurt just shy of very painfully.

“That’s what you like, isn’t it, Cassie? When I pinch them hard?”

Although her eyes closed for a second longer than usual, she opened them again obediently and met his eyes in the mirror as she answered, through heaving breaths, “Yes, Sir,” having learned from very painful experience that he expected immediate answers to even such intimate questions.

She was quite sure that her bottom was always going to wear the marks from that lesson, as he had used a quirt styled implement during that particular recent correction that she was quite sure had flayed the flesh from her bones and left terrible, terrible scars. But the truth was that he was skillful enough with that instrument to impart the worst pain imaginable, but still leave her flesh if not untouched, then definitely without any permanent scars.

Although they weren’t in a position to kiss deeply, as was his preference, his mouth was far from idle, licking and kissing its way up and down her slim, graceful neck, reaching for and finding the tip of her earlobe and razing it with the very edges of his teeth, as he did to her nipples quite often. He correctly suspected that the results would be much the same, and wasn’t disappointed by the way he heard her breath sizzle in through her clenched teeth.

When he had her right on the verge of an orgasm merely by playing with her breasts – something that Anjel vowed to himself that he would attempt with her later, when his need for her had cooled somewhat, although he wasn’t at all sure when that would be since his desire for her only seemed to be mounting exponentially – he brought his palms down harshly on those exquisitely sensitized globes, careful to make sure that her nipples caught a significant amount of the slaps, making her try to arch herself away from him, but there was nowhere to go, trapped as she was by his cruel hands in the front and the unyielding wall of muscle right behind her.