In the Garden of Sin (35 page)

“As you wish, my lady.”

Elic needed his instructions, too, but he was nowhere to be seen, so she walked down the gravel drive to the stable, thinking he might still be there with the baroness he’d gone to meet earlier. As she approached the big stone barn, she heard hectic panting from within. With practiced vampiric stealth—Turek should have been there taking notes—she crept along the side of the building to a Dutch door with the top part open. She took off her sunglasses and scanned the dusky interior, lit only by ribbons of late afternoon sunlight.

Diagonally across the central aisle, in a stall enclosed by a grilled wooden partition, stood a big, sturdy chestnut horse with its head down. It appeared to be calmly munching hay while Elic, naked from the waist up, banged a petite brunette in half-undone baroness attire—“Lady Alison,” presumably— atop its broad, blanketed back. With one long arm, he gripped the top of the grill for purchase, his other arm wrapped around Alison’s back to hold her in place with her legs over his thighs as he fucked her. Each driving stroke forced a breathy little cry from her lungs and whipped his sweat-soaked hair. His body gleamed, every hardworking muscle sharply delineated.

Galiana had come there to give Elic his marching orders, but the sight of that beautiful body heaving in sensual abandon poleaxed her. He really was a Viking sex god, born to do exactly what he was doing right now. She grew wet all over again, thinking about the little threesome she would be presiding over in the dungeon that night. One of the most mindblowingly sexy men she’d ever known would be completely in her power, obligated to obey her every command. That Elic clearly didn’t have a submissive bone in his body, but would be required to do her bidding anyway, made the prospect that much more enticing.

He went still, chest pumping, and looked in Galiana’s direction as she ducked behind the wall.

“Don’t stop!” Alison gasped. “Don’t stop, Elic—please. I’m going to come again.”

“Is someone there?” he called out breathlessly.

“Did you hear someone?” the brunette asked anxiously.

“No, but I smell something lemony and kind of…murky.”

“It’s probably just furniture polish.”

“No, there’s some grapefruit, a hint of bergamot, maybe a little bitter orange. I think it’s La Fièvre de la Jungle.”

You have got to be fucking kidding me
, Galiana thought.

“Galiana, is that you?” he asked.

I don’t believe this
. Stepping back in front of the Dutch door, she said, “Don’t stop on my account. I just—”

“Jesus.” Alison cringed and turned her face away. “She was
watching
us?”

“It’s all right,” he murmured, kissing her head as he gathered her up in a protective gesture that Galiana probably would have found touching if she were susceptible to sentimentality.

He looked toward Galiana, strands of damp hair hanging over his scalding blue eyes, and said, “Sorry, but we’re really not into an audience. If you like to watch, try the courtyard.”

Galiana turned and walked away, thinking
Holy shit, have I been dismissed? Did he fucking dismiss me?

He did. And she let him. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had told her what to do, however politely. The ease with which he had done so inspired a little carnal thrill that made her smile, until she remembered…

Murky?
A thousand bucks an ounce, and she’d been smelling like fucking furniture polish? The first thing she’d do when they showed her to her room would be to wash off every
bit of that goddamned overpriced shit and throw the rest in the garbage.

Elic didn’t serve dinner or clean up with the rest of the subs, so Galiana didn’t encounter him again until around nine, when she was told he’d been seen entering the library. She found him sitting on a leather couch next to another man, both of them leaning forward to look at a book lying open on a table. The book was clearly very old, its parchment pages warped and heavily discolored.

Elic’s companion, a darkly handsome guy dressed in jeans and a faded brown henley shirt, was saying “…originated in a cuneiform tablet dating from the Iron Age, which was translated into two or three different Old Italic languages before this Latin translation by a ninth-century Irish monk, but I doubt the content was distorted to any appreciable—”

“Good evening, my lady,” Elic said as he rose and bowed to Galiana. So it was back to “my lady” after the familiar way he’d addressed her in the stable. His hair was wet and haphazardly tied back with a strip of leather at his nape. They’d told her there was a bathhouse here; maybe that was where she should have looked for him.

The other man closed the book, which had a cover of ragged tooled leather over wooden boards, and stood, too.

Elic said, “Lady Galiana, may I introduce my friend Darius, who also lives at Grotte Cachée.”

“My pleasure.” Darius’s voice was pleasantly deep, with a subtle accent that didn’t sound quite European.

Indicating his mundane attire, she said, “You aren’t participating in the festivities?”

“Not really my cup of tea, I’m afraid.”

“How may I be of service, my lady?” Elic asked.

Leveling her chilliest gaze at him, she said, “You were impertinent this afternoon in the stable. Meet me at a quarter after ten in the dungeon. I assure you, you’ll find your chastisement memorable, and possibly quite painful. I will permit you to bring a tube of lubricant. Other than that, I’m afraid you will find me a rather rigid and unforgiving disciplinarian.”

He regarded her in silence for a moment before bending his head and saying, “I am yours to command, my lady.”

Y THE TIME ELIC ARRIVED in the dungeon, Galiana had Isolde just where she wanted her: bent over with her head and hands locked in the antique pillory and her ankles held wide apart by foot stocks, naked but for a leather bondage hood and ball gag. Galiana, wearing nothing but her gold boots, her chunky Renaissance jewelry, and her huge, veiny black strap-on, was giving the super-submissive wench the whip-fucking of her life.

With every few snapping thrusts, she brought her cane singing down onto Isolde’s upthrust ass. Aluminum canes hurt like hell, eliciting, in this instance, a muffled cry with every stroke. They also left extremely beautiful crimson stripes, which was one of the reasons Galiana was so fond of hers. Against the redhead’s pale flesh, the marks looked as if they’d been drawn on using a red Sharpie and a ruler.

Stunning. The sight made Galiana’s mouth water. It made her fangs, tucked away in the roof of her mouth, tickle and throb. The seductive contrast of stinging red against pure, milky white… the blood so deliciously close to the surface of the skin, she could almost taste it…

Patience
, she told herself. Later, after she had finished with Elic and sent him away, she would sip from the tracery of sweet little blue veins under that marble skin. She wouldn’t share her with Anton, either. Fuck him, let him find his own pigeons.

But for now, she had other priorities. There was an investigational aspect to tonight’s “punishment” of Elic. How much of it would he accept, she wondered, before he rebelled—
if
he rebelled? It took iron-cast balls to resist Galiana’s innate authority. Look at Anton. If one discounted how he acted with her, he came off pretty goddamned menacing. His lifelong body count was probably higher than hers, considering his perverse love of death feeds, yet he’d been her toady since the French Revolution. True, he’d deceived her about this little visit to Grotte Cachée—for which he would pay with his life after he helped her to land Elic, regardless of what the gullible little nit believed—but to her knowledge, he’d never pulled a stunt like this before.

Would Elic bend over for her, as Anton had, or would he push back a little bit? The answer to that question would determine what kind of strategy she should employ in winning him over.

Galiana made a show of ignoring Elic as he walked toward them through the torchlit stone undercroft. Grotte Cachée’s medieval-era torture chamber made your average BDSM dungeon look like a Sunday School classroom. Each of its six vaulted bays housed several instruments of punishment, some clearly as old as the castle itself, such as the rack, the iron chair,
the whipping stool, the hanging cage, and the pillory Galiana was making such excellent use of. There were a few furnishings that clearly dated from the last few centuries: a Berkley horse, a triangular flogging ladder, a bondage bed with a pillory headboard, and a steel St. Andrew’s cross. Shelves held myriad smaller implements of malevolent design, and racks of whips, paddles, ropes, leather straps, straitjackets and the like adorned nearly every wall. Two massive stone columns were embedded with rings and hooks festooned with archaic manacles, modern handcuffs, leg irons, and chains.

From the corner of her eye, Galiana saw Elic watching her intently as she rammed the big black phallus into the captive sub. Every thrust caused the strategically placed nubs on the inside of the harness to rub against her clit, stoking her pleasure.

He eyed her hungrily, his cock rising thick and hard.

“I like to have a nice, full pussy when I come,” she told him. “Do a decent job of it, and I might show you a little mercy when it’s time for your punishment.” As if the word “mercy” meant anything at all to her.

“At your service, my lady.”

As Elic untied his codpiece, she bent over Isolde with her legs spread to present her wet, gaping cunt to him. The dildo itself was made of a flexible gel, and the vinyl strap-on was styled with thigh bands like a jockstrap, so that she could fuck and be fucked at the same time, which she loved.

Her hips jerked reflexively when Elic slid his fingertips between her pussy lips and spread them wide. He held them open as he stood there, lightly stroking his erection, making Galiana feel exposed and vulnerable—not a sensation she was accustomed to; the very novelty of it was strangely arousing.

Just when she was about to tell him to go ahead and fuck her already, he shoved himself into her—or tried to. The moment his flesh touched hers, he went limp.

“What the hell…?” he muttered.

“You’re kidding,” she said. An incubus with erectile dysfunction? Of course, as far as he knew, she regarded him as an ordinary mortal—which was, of course, what he took her to be. She’d given him no reason to suspect otherwise.

He pumped his cock to full tumescence and tried to penetrate her again, with the same result.

“Are you drunk?” she asked.

“No.”

“Um…do you have this problem with other women?”

There came a pause. Very quietly, no doubt so Isolde wouldn’t hear, he said, “Not human women. Ever.”

Galiana turned to look at him over her shoulder. He was regarding her with an expression of revelation and curiosity, as if wondering what kind of Follet he had on his hands.

Meanwhile, it was suddenly all too fucking clear what he was.

Goddamn
. The most incandescently hot male she’d come across in centuries, and he couldn’t fuck her?

Straightening up, she pulled the dildo out of Isolde, who mewed petulantly at its removal. “Fuck
her
, then. I’m bored with her.”