In the Garden of Sin (13 page)

She nodded; even through the veiling, I could see her cheeks pinken. Women with coloring like Lucy’s—and mine, for that matter—can hide nothing.

“Have you ever made love in the Greek manner?” Elic asked her as he raised his beaker to his mouth.

“Nay, not… not really,” she said in an unsteady voice. “I tried it once, but it hurt, so I made the fellow stop.”

Elic said, “Your patron has very exacting standards for his
courtesans. He insists they should not just endure this form of coupling but take pleasure in it. There are measures we can take to make it both comfortable and stimulating for you.”

“Wh-what measures?” she asked.

Inigo, now in his shirtsleeves, patted the odd, leather-upholstered bed-cum-table, which stood at an angle to me. “If you will but lie upon the training bed, facedown, you shall find out soon enough. Come. I’ll help you up.”

She hesitated, regarding the bed uneasily.

In a grave tone, Elic said, “Lucy, if you don’t cooperate, Don Domenico will send you back to London. He’s done it before.”

“Nay! Nay, I cannot go back. I cannot live in hiding again, and if my husband finds me, he’ll beat me to death, I know it. I’ll cooperate, I will. I… I don’t mind it, not really, not the idea of it. But the pain…”

“We won’t hurt you, I promise,” Elic said as he rose and ushered her with a hand on her back to the training bed. “And you really will learn to enjoy it, you’ll see.”

She allowed him to lift her onto the bed, lying facedown when he instructed her to do so, her body starkly white against the lustrous black leather.

Inigo placed a small table next to the bed. From the cabinet, he retrieved a silver tray, which he set on the table. Opening a drawer in the cabinet, he chose four shiny black cylindrical objects of varying lengths and diameters. The smallest was as slim as my little finger, the largest about eight or ten inches long and almost as thick around as my wrist. Most had raised designs on them, and they all had fat knobs on one end and tapering, slightly rounded tips on the other. These items he laid out on the tray by ascending size as Lucy stared, wide-eyed.

“What are those things?” I whispered to Vitturi.

“Lacquered dildos from China.”

So dildos
were
phalluses; I was glad to have this confirmed.

“Don’t forget the oil,” Elic told Inigo as he rested a comforting hand on Lucy’s back.

His friend shot him a look as he pulled a tiny white porcelain bottle from his pocket. “Am I ever without it?”

Sitting on the edge of the training bed, he picked up the smallest of the dildoes by the bulb at its base, drizzled a bit of the bottle’s contents onto it, and rubbed it to thoroughly coat it.

Lucy squeezed her eyes shut and clenched her teeth as he used his free hand to spread the cheeks of her buttocks.

“Becalm yourself, Lucy,” Inigo said as he positioned the slender little phallus. “The less tense you are, the less this will trouble you.”

She took a deep breath and appeared to visibly relax, but no sooner did he penetrate her with the little device than she yelped and twisted around to swat him away.

Groaning in exasperation, Inigo told Elic, “Just use your
liggia spiall
on her.”

Fixing his friend with a look, Elic said evenly, quietly, “You know I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

With a meaningful glance around the perimeter of the round chamber, Elic whispered something I couldn’t hear.

Inigo winced. “Sorry, brother. Wasn’t thinking.”

Liggia spiall?
I looked toward Vitturi, but he was frowning in evident bewilderment.

“Why don’t we just, uh…” Inigo nodded toward the hat stand festooned with straps and chains.

“Not yet.” Turning to Lucy, sitting on the bed with her arms wrapped around her upraised knees, Elic said, “I thought you wanted to cooperate.”

“I… I do, I swear it, but…”

“Did it hurt?” Elic asked her.

“This?”
Inigo held the tiny phallus up.

“Nay, it didn’t hurt, but it felt so…” She shuddered. “When I felt it go in, I just panicked.”

“’Tis this or London,” Inigo said, brandishing the phallus.

With a sigh of capitulation, she lay back down, promising to lie still this time, but when Inigo attempted again to insert the dildo into her, she leapt up kicking and flailing.

Her fist slammed into his nose.

He howled.

“Lucy!” Elic gripped her arms and pushed her back down onto her stomach. “For pity’s sake.”

“Oh, God, I’m sorry!” she said. “I’m sorry, Inigo. I just… I can’t help it. It feels so, so…”

“Sh, don’t fret so,” Elic murmured. Folding her arms behind her, he clamped a hand around both of her wrists, pressing them to the small of her back. He caught Inigo’s eye and cocked his head toward the hat stand.

Inigo went to it, dabbing a handkerchief under his badly swollen nose, which was trickling blood.
“Now
you come round,” he said nasally, “after she broke my bloody nose.”

“’Twill get better.” Elic’s disregard for his friend’s injury— the nose did, indeed, look broken—struck me as curious, given the compassion he displayed with others.

Plucking two short leather straps off the stand, Inigo hooked them to a pair of small rings on the bottom corners of the training bed, just two of many that I now noticed at intervals among the nail heads.

“What are you doing?” Lucy asked.

“Making this easier for you.” Inigo pulled her left foot toward him and buckled the strap around her ankle, then circled the bed to tether the other ankle as well.

“You don’t need to do this,” Lucy said, craning her neck to
look over her shoulder at her widespread, tightly bound legs. “I won’t move, I promise.”

“That’s what you said before you smashed my nose.” Inigo fetched two more straps, one short and one long. He handed the short one to Elic, who wrapped it around Lucy’s crossed wrists, trussing her hands behind her. The other, Inigo buckled across her waist, securing her firmly to the bench.

“You curs!” She struggled against her restraints, her upper body straining off the bed, those lush breasts swaying. Her lower body could wriggle a bit, but that was all.

“’Tis for your own good,” Inigo said. “You don’t want to be shipped back to London, do you?”

“N-nay, but—”

“Well, then.” He parted her bottom cheeks and plunged the little phallus in all the way to the knob.

She thrashed, swearing like a sailor. Elic held her still, murmuring soothing things into her ear until she settled down, red-faced and glowering.

“How does it feel?” he asked her.

She squirmed a bit, her expression sullen. “I loathe you, both of you.”

Inigo smiled and gave the dildo a little jiggle. She sucked in a breath, but didn’t budge as he slid it almost completely out of her, then in again, and again, and again. He moved it in a circular motion for some time, then asked Elic to take over while he oiled the next one, which was about as thick as his thumb, with little bumps all over it.

As soon as he pulled the first one out of her, he replaced it with the second, pressing it into her slowly. He paused when she cried out, her body jerking. If she hadn’t been strapped down, she probably would have bolted off the bench.

“Does it hurt?” Elic asked.

“Nay, but… Gadzooks, it feels so big, too big.”

“’Tis just the right size,” he assured her, stroking her hair as Inigo pushed the studded phallus deeper, deeper. “Think about how wonderful it feels entering you, filling you.”

“And look at it from the man’s perspective,” Inigo said. “Imagine how it feels to be buried in such a snug little aperture. ’Tis a gloriously tight fit around a full cockstand.”

Standing across the bed from Inigo, Elic slid his hand between Lucy’s legs and under her mons, cupping it as Inigo manipulated the phallus this way and that.

“’Tis best if you’re as aroused as possible before your benefactor takes you this way,” Elic said, “and of course, you want to remain so while he’s inside you. You can touch your clit very softly, like this, or ask him to do it.”

She gasped; it turned into a moan.
He’s stroking her pearl
, I thought. I didn’t know how I felt about the word “clit.”

I started when Vitturi leaned over to whisper in my ear, “Like Lucy, you will need to learn to connect the sensation of being penetrated this way with erotic pleasure. That way, when one of your benefactors takes you in this manner, you’ll still find it sexually arousing even when you aren’t being directly stimulated.”

Given his matter-of-fact tone, he might have been discussing politics instead of sodomy. I wondered if he had ever had a woman the Greek way, and concluded that he must have. I envisioned him rearing over a prone female, pushing himself into her as he caressed her breasts and her sex, thrusting, sweating, groaning…My own sex pulsed with desire as I imagined how it would feel to be breached in such a manner—by a man who was, as Lucy had said of Domenico Vitturi, a gentleman but also a bit of a savage, a man who was not afraid to “let the beast out of its cage.”

“If you can time your climax so that you come first,” Inigo told Lucy, “he’ll feel every spasm with astonishing intensity.”

The third phallus was about as big around as a broom handle, with a raised spiral down its length. Inigo pushed it into her, twisting and turning it, as Elic caressed her sex, murmuring “Accept it… Let it in. Let it possess you.”

She lay still as it penetrated her from the tip to the bulblike handle, her breath quickening, her color high.

“Is there any pain?” Elic asked, still caressing her sex.

“Nay,” she breathed. “None at all.”

With his free hand, Elic started unbuckling the strap around her wrists. “I don’t think you need these anymore.”

“I may,” she said. “Perhaps you’d best leave them.”

The two men shared a smile as Elic rebuckled the restraint. Inigo scooped a hand under her breast, kneading it gently as he maneuvered the phallus. Lucy’s hips rose a bit every time he thrust it into her, lowered as he tugged it out.

She whimpered when he withdrew it completely, but smiled, lifting her bottom when she felt the tip of the final and largest one nudging her open.

“You can push it in harder,” she said breathlessly as he worked it in inch by inch. “I don’t mind.”

“You see? The third one prepared you for the fourth, and the fourth will prepare you for this,” Inigo said, stroking himself between his legs.

So fixated had I been on Lucy and what was happening to her that I hadn’t noticed Inigo’s condition until then—bizarre, considering how obvious it was beneath the shirt hanging down over his breeches. Elic’s doublet had a long, pointed skirt that concealed his groin, but I assumed he was as aroused as his friend.

Without even meaning to, I looked at Don Domenico, at his lap. His doublet was skirted with square tabs that parted, revealing a sizable bulge.

Lucy’s strident moaning drew my gaze back to the Training
Room, where Inigo was still frigging her—another coarse word I now knew the meaning of—with the big dildo. Her thrusting had taken on a strained, frantic quality as she rubbed her sex against Elic’s hand.

“Nay!” she cried when he took his hand away. “I’m about to spend.”

“I know,” he said as he unbuttoned his doublet. “’Tisn’t time yet.”

Much as I tried to concentrate on what was happening inside the Training Room, my mind kept returning to Vitturi, sitting right next to me, as aroused as I. I couldn’t help but recall that first night, when we were walking away from the bathhouse and I turned to see Sibylla kneeling before him, relieving him of his lust.

Methinks ’twas watching Hannah that excited him so
, Lucy had said.

I swallowed hard, licked my lips.
Do it. Say it
. “Don Domenico, I…” I glanced at him, then down at my nervously clenched hands. “If you wish it, I would be…more than willing to…”

I had run out of words.

He was staring at me.

Lifting my great mass of skirts, I knelt on the floor and rested a hand upon his knee. “You’ve asked very little of me, and—”

“You offer this as compensation, then, for my patronage.”

I shook my head, gazing up at him in the dark, at his anguished beauty. “I offer it because… I would like to. I want to.”

Reaching slowly toward him, I pried loose a button of his breeches with trembling fingers. He seized my hand and pressed it against the rigid column. His eyes closed. A muscle flexed in his jaw.

Abruptly he flung my hand away and stood, looking down
at me as I knelt at his feet. “Did Elle not tell you I’ve no stomach for pity?”

So he
had
been listening to my conversation with Elle in the library the night before—or to enough of it to have heard me tell her that I felt sorry for him.

Bracing a hand on the couch to rise, I said, “Don Domen—”

“Stay here and learn something.” He turned and strode stiffly away.

I sank onto the floor, my head in my hands.
You fool, Hannah, you absurd little ass
.

“Nay, don’t unbind me, I pray you,” Lucy said.

I looked up to see Inigo unbuckling the strap across her waist. A tiny speck of blood under one nostril was the only remaining evidence of his broken nose. The swelling had completely subsided; it wasn’t even red.

It must not have really been broken
, I thought. It had certainly looked that way, though.

“I’m just taking off this one,” Inigo said as he hung the strap back on the hat stand. “The rest can remain as they are.”

As Inigo held the dildo in place, Elic, shirtless now, helped Lucy to rise to her knees, still widespread because of her tethered ankles. The way her wrists were bound behind her forced her back to arch, thrusting out her breasts. Elic suckled her nipples as he opened his breeches, and then he lay on his back between her thighs. Guiding her with one hand and his cock-stand with the other, he lowered her onto the tumescent organ.

“Oh, God, I’m so close,” she moaned as she began to writhe atop him.

“Not yet,” he said, holding her still as Inigo leapt up onto the training bed.