A Touch of Sin (33 page)

"She's becoming impatient, Jamil. See if that new machine will temporarily quench her desires."

The turquoise-colored apparatus was made of lustrous Florentine leather, the dildo and attached gold buckled harness tinkling as Jamil moved toward her. The size of the leather device required introduction by slow degrees and even feverishly aroused and well lubricated, she stirred fitfully under the delicate thrusts. By the time the enormous shaft was partially lodged, she was whimpering, her tissue stretched taut.

Pressing the shaft home, Jamil stroked, pushed, massaged, penetrated a small distance at a time until the last invading portion of turquoise leather disappeared inside her. Completely glutted, throbbing so pervasively the feverish ache stretched through her entire body, insensible to all but images of Pasha and a voracious sexual craving, Trixi was so near orgasm she could scarcely breathe.

"Now," Hussein quietly commanded, watching her with a sharpened concentration.

Jamil exerted a delicate pressure and Trixi gasped, agonizing pleasure tearing through her senses. She screamed as her climax broke, her cry swelling, rising, lasting, lasting, the drugs inducing a feverish level of raw, unbridled feeling. Her orgasm was so prolonged, Hussein abruptly reached for the bottle of cantharides and swallowed a double dose.

"She's undeniably a woman of sexual appetites," he murmured. "But then I should have known, with Pasha Bey having her service him." Reaching for his pipe and inhaling, he debated what pleasures his newest acquisition held in store for him. Then exhaling, he lazily commanded, "Have her walk before me so I can admire the pale English beauty from all sides."

"She may not be able to walk, master, with this huge instrument inside her."

A slow, salacious smile formed on the general's mouth. "Why don't we see."

Jamil clasped the turquoise leather belt around Trixi's waist as she lay in an incandescence of carnal lust, the aphrodisiacs coursing through her blood, voracious desire still raging in every pulsing nerve and cell and tissue. When Jamil slipped two straps into fasteners, front and back, she shifted at the slight movement inside her. But moments later, she drew in a gasping inhalation as he tugged the first buckle tight, forcing the dildo deeper, the padded collar at the base squeezing her engorged vulva and clitoris. After the second clasp was firmly buckled, the pressure intensified, the friction on her clitoris so sensational she instantly climaxed again in a long, shuddering orgasm.

Hussein shook another dose of cantharides into his palm. Indeed, three thousand thrusts
might
be required before the Englishwoman was sated.

Jamil wiped Trixi's heated body with a damp perfumed cloth, offered her a drink to cool her, made her comfortable with pillows under her head. "When she's somewhat more calm," Hussein directed, "set her on her feet. I want to see her promenade in her pretty harness."

After a moderate interval, Hussein had Jamil lift Trixi to her feet. But even the slightest movement stirred the dildo inside her, stimulated her overstimulated flesh, rendered her immobile, and standing utterly still, eyes shut and panting, she shivered under the heated delirium flaring through her senses.

But Hussein motioned for her to walk and Jamil gently tugged on her hands. Submissive under the effects of the drugs, she took a step and instantly reeled from the shocking pressure of the tightly fastened dildo. Catching her around her waist as she fell, Jamil carried her back and placed her beside the general. "We'll have to let her rest for a longer time," Hussein noted, caressing her plump breast, gratified by her wanton passions. "After an hour or so, she'll feel less agitated. Pour us some wine, Jamil, while we wait and tell me, how long do you think it will be before Pasha Bey is captured?"

Pasha stood arrested in the doorway of Hussein's tented bedchamber, Jamil's blood on his dagger, his breath momentarily in abeyance. Could you kill someone more than once? he wondered, watching the man and woman on the divan. His need for vengeance was so great, he forgot he had only seconds to accomplish what he'd come to do. He put his hand out, to restrain Makriyannis, who was about to move forward.

His blood-lust was so acute, he could taste it.

His hand came up, fingers spread.

Makriyannis pushed it down, shook his head, and held up one finger.

Fuck you, Pasha mouthed. The silence in the tented chamber was broken only by the sounds of carnal arousal, a woman's soft moaning, the harsher breathing of Hussein.

Damn her.

Damn him.

Damn the whole world of shameless cunts.

He'd cut off Hussein's balls first, Pasha vowed, silently moving forward. And if there was time, he'd watch him bleed to death. But Makriyannis was thinking with more than his gonads and his dagger sailed through the air past Pasha, striking its target with precision a flashing millisecond later. Hussein fell forward with a muffled gurgle, the dagger blade piercing his neck and throat.

"I'm not dying for him," Makriyannis whispered, racing forward to execute a coup de grace with his yataghan. Pasha dove to cover Trixi's mouth with his hand, her eyes wide, frantic, patently unfocused.

Already wrapping her in the sheet, Pasha forced a portion of the fabric in her mouth. She was obviously drugged, in an unstable state, her eyes vacant. Pulling a cord from his pocket, he tied the gag in place. They had five hundred yards of armed camp to traverse in complete silence; he couldn't take any chances. His mind was clear again, his judgment restored.

Makriyannis rolled Hussein's head in the magenta robe and, slinging it over his shoulder, pointed at the door with his yataghan.
¹⁷
Pasha nodded, his dagger between his teeth, Trixi in his arms. Both men carried loaded pistols.
¹⁸

The dead guards in the antechamber lay where they died; the two outside guards had been dragged into the tent out of sight, the men's throats slit in a silent death. Dressed as Turkish noncommissioned officers—their apparel requisitioned from two of Hussein's sentry posts—Pasha and Makriyannis hoped to make their way back through the city of tents, past the campfires that blazed in the night.

The first two hundred yards they passed unmolested, the men walking at a stroll through the shadowed passages between the tents, careful not to call attention to themselves by undue speed. Most of the army slept at that time of night. They skirted a soldier relieving himself outside his tent and avoided another drunkenly weaving his way back to his quarters. But as they moved into the sector adjacent to their escape route, they came within sight of a group of soldiers sitting around a fire drinking.

The sea was to their right, the armed camp to their left. They had no choice but to continue forward. Makriyannis moved between Pasha and the fire, hoping to shield Trixi. Both men checked to see that their weapons were primed.

When they came within twenty feet of the firelit scene, one of the soldiers called out to them, the man's voice thick with drink. "Is that a lady I see?" he shouted, adding a ribald comment on ladies of the night.

"We're taking her to our sentry company," Makriyannis blandly replied in an Alexandrian dialect.

"I was born in Alexandria, too." The Egyptian soldier jumped to his feet, striding toward them, and moments later he was hugging Makriyannis like a long-lost brother. Offering him a drink from his cup, he spoke in the inebriated fulsome tones of an intimate. "Come, come, join us… bring the lady. We've plenty of rum. Rumor has it Hussein won't be moving for days, so we've plenty of time."

He didn't know how true his words were, and although Makriyannis tried to beg off, each of his excuses was resisted with the single-minded purpose of a man well into his cups. Once the soldier's companions joined in the chorus of invitation, Pasha and Makriyannis had little choice but to join them.

Pasha had slid his knife and pistol out of sight when the soldier first approached, but his weapons were at the ready beneath the draped sheet enfolding Trixi. Both men approached the firelit group with caution.

"Just one drink," Makriyannis declared, taking the bottle offered him and sitting down. "We have to go on first patrol in the morning."

"Leave the lady with us, then," a sprawled soldier replied, leering. "We'll see that she's well taken care of."

"Sorry, we paid too much for her," Makriyannis genially replied. "She represents all our booty from Choura, so she comes with us."
¹⁹

"But there's only two of you and four of us," another drunken trooper crudely threatened, patting his hip where his sword should have been.

The lack had already been noted by Pasha and Makriyannis. None of the men were armed, their muskets stacked beside the tent; the surrounding tents stood silent, without campfires. "Let's not argue over a woman," Makriyannis jovially remarked, "when there's plenty of rum. When do you think we can finally finish this damned war?" he went on, passing the bottle to the man beside him. And the conversation turned to the quick and speedy subjugation of Greece.

Positioning himself in the shadows beyond the glow of the fire, Pasha sat with Trixi on his lap, her face against his chest. That she was gagged didn't pique their interest; women were a commodity to be bought and sold in their culture.

The rum bottle made the rounds several more times. A fifth man wandered out from the labyrinth of passageways between tents and joined them, lengthening their odds.

With the possibility that the slaughter in Hussein's tent might be discovered at any moment, Pasha carefully kept watch on the moon moving across the sky, his tension rising with each quashing of Makriyannis's attempts to leave. After what seemed an interminable time, unable to endure any further delay, Pasha abruptly rose and said in Turkic, "I'm taking the lady to my quarters."

"That's not very friendly," one of the men replied in broken Turkish.

"But then I'm not in a friendly mood," Pasha softly growled.

"If we don't show up for patrol," Makriyannis interjected, quickly coming to his feet, "they'll give us the lash. Thanks for the rum."

"I want a turn with the cunt," a brawny soldier muttered, beginning to rise, drunken menace in his tone.

"I don't share," Pasha calmly said, moving back a step.

"Maybe you don't have a choice," the contentious soldier snarled, standing unsteadily.

"I always have choices," Pasha murmured, his finger resting on his pistol trigger.

A tense silence fell, hostility palpable.

"We want the woman—right?" Pasha's opponent surveyed his compatriots, his gaze flickering over his friends, poised now in varying states of readiness.

"Why not?" one of the soldiers agreed. "We deserve some booty, too."

"Come and get the woman tomorrow when we're done with her," Makriyannis proposed. "Our sentry post is just over that hill." He indicated the closest rise.

"I don't want to wait," the brawny soldier brusquely retorted. "We'll keep her tonight and
you
can come and get her in the morning." He pulled a dagger from his boot. "What do you think of that?" he challenged, touching the tip of his blade with his finger.