Into The Arena (2 page)

Chapter
2

It was the most terrifying drive of her life. And she loved every second of it. The man wasn't just as good as she was, he was in a class of his own. He scythed through the early evening traffic with contemptuous ease, and then slipped out onto the motorway. Tara watched as the speedometer climbed steadily to 130 and held there.

"My name's Conor," the man announced, breaking his silence.

Tara found she had to lick her dry lips before telling him hers.

"Well Tara my beauty - I'm taking you to a little club I know. I think you'll like the floor show they have there."

He lapsed back into silence, and Tara had no desire to distract him with conversation. He was carving back through the slower lanes without reducing his own speed and then they were hurtling up a slip road towards a roundabout. Instinctively, Tara found her right foot jamming itself into the floor, trying to brake. There was no way they'd get round the roundabout at that speed, no way! She grabbed the dashboard and braced herself as the Merc heeled over and squealed rubber, fighting to make an impossible turn.

She opened her eyes. They were doing a mere eighty now, down a long tree-lined road. She breathed out in relief, and then rounded on him in fury. Alright, she loved driving fast but that had been pure craziness.

"You bloody maniac! Do you always drive like that?!"

Conor put his head back and guffawed. "Jeez no!" he said. "I go much faster when I'm sober!"

Tara gaped at him and couldn't think of what to say. She'd been on the end of plenty of half-drunk pickup attempts, it was often the only way the men could summon up the courage. But this man wasn't like that. He was joking.......surely.

As if reading her thoughts he intoned solemnly and precisely, "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper.....Six thick thistle sticks......" And then cast that mischievous grin at her.

Tara couldn't help bursting out laughing, and then shrieked in mock dismay as he abruptly turned sharp left, flinging her against him. As she sat up, she saw they were speeding down a long drive towards an elegant manor house, in front of which were parked a lot of other expensive cars. He spun the Merc in a deft handbrake turn to leave it rocking on its sorely tested suspension outside the impressive, porticoed front door.

He was out and holding her door for her before she had got her breath back. In the movement common to all women in short skirts getting out of low-slung cars, Tara pressed her thighs together and swung them out to stand up. As she did so she realised that she should have brought a spare pair of knickers. The pair she had only just put on were already soaking. The drive had turned her on more than she would have believed possible.

Conor held her left upper arm in a grip of irresistible strength and pulled her close when she stood up. Suddenly serious he stared down at her with dark intense eyes that bored into her. She felt mesmerised and stared back helplessly, he was unlike any man she had ever met. A dream date? Or a nightmare.

"You're beautiful Tara," he said quietly. "I'm going to shag you rigid later on. Anything less would be an insult to you."

Once again Tara was completely lost. Deep in her mind she knew she should hit him, or protest, or do something to unsettle him; shock him out of his smug, arrogant assumptions. But her body was thrumming like a plucked violin string, completely overwhelmed by his dominating physical presence. She struggled to reply for a second but then he led her inside and she made no attempt to hang back, apprehension and the excitement of the unknown curdling her insides.

He led her through a gracious, marbled interior. Two uniformed flunkies appeared and greeted Conor as 'Mr Brien'. One took the car keys to park it, the other led them right through the house and ushered them into a large modern extension leading on from the back of the old house. If it had windows, they were shuttered and Tara stared round as her eyes accustomed themselves to the soft lighting. It was a large restaurant of sorts, many tables, nearly all filled by couples or foursomes, were ranged round a central floor area which was occupied by a wrestling or boxing ring. A waiter seemed to be expecting Conor and led them to a table only twenty feet or so away from the ring.

"Food first, then the entertainment," Conor said, handing her a menu. Something about his use of the word 'entertainment' rekindled the tingling at her groin which had settled down a little since their arrival and his promise for later on.

They ordered and ate a pleasant, well-prepared meal. Conor also ordered two bottles of a superb red wine, the labels of which made Tara wince at the thought of the cost. He knocked back one and a half of them, and Tara worried about the drive home.

"We're staying here for the night," he told her when she timidly voiced her concerns. She had never been timid in her life before this evening.

"You take a hell of a lot for granted don't you?" she managed to retort this time.

"Tell me I'm wrong and you don't want to sleep with me, and I'll get you a cab home right now. No problem."

Tara read the challenge in his eyes and squared her shoulders. She wasn't going to back down, and anyway she recalled that earlier crack about shagging her rigid. Very well, let him try, let him see if he could.

"All right, I'll stay, but you'd better be as good as you reckon."

"Bravely spoken Tara. Waiter! Bring a bottle of cognac over here."

Just as the cognac arrived the house lights went down and spotlights flicked on, bathing the ring in brilliant light. The entertainment had begun.

Tara's emotions went on a roller coaster ride for the first half hour or so. To begin with she was horrified and humiliated on behalf of her sex, but then either because of the alcohol or the scenes unfolding before her, or both, what she was watching began to take on a thrilling eroticism.

Two men ducked into the ring to loud applause, behind them came two women led by leashes attached to collars at their necks. They were dressed in ridiculous outfits, Tara thought. One was in a sort of leather bikini and the other was in a two-piece lycra outfit with a micro skirt. Both women wore high-heeled shoes which they took off once they entered the ring and gave to their men. The audience was applauding wildly and Tara realised that included the women.

"They're subs," Conor told her, and added when she still looked blank, "submissives. Their masters have put them up for a fight and we've all got bets on. I've got five hundred on the one in leather."

As Tara looked back to the ring, the men unclipped their leashes and ducked back out. Immediately the two women rushed at each other and began clawing and slapping and hair pulling. It was almost laughably amateurish but as Tara watched she had to admit that there was something savagely arousing about watching women fight. It soon became clear that the first object of the contest was to be the first to get the opponent naked, and in a few minutes both women's breasts were exposed. They swung and bounced as the bodies struggled, squeezing together into flattened mounds when the wrestlers locked, and when they parted, Tara noted, the nipples were hardened and erect. The same as hers, she realised.

Conor's fancy succeeded in shredding the lycra skirt of her opponent and Tara had to restrain a gasp of excited shock when she saw the smooth curves of the buttocks shamelessly exposed under the spotlights. With one woman naked the contest really hotted up. Tara winced as she saw nipples grabbed and twisted, nails dug deep into buttocks and slaps administered to breasts. Even though the contest was frantic in comparison to the little wrestling she had ever seen on TV, it was obvious that nothing was faked. The squeals of anguish, the meaty sound of open palms slamming across quivering breasts was too real. But every now and then one or other of the women would manage a clean throw, usually from no higher than hip height, but being close to the ring, Tara could clearly see the ripples run through the thighs, buttocks and breasts as the body hit, and then bounced off the canvas. For some reason, this sight sent a stomach-lurching jolt of excitement through her. And by the time it was clear that the woman in leather, the tatters of her thong still clinging to her crotch, was winning, Tara was shouting as loudly as everyone else, cheering her on. At last she got her opponent in an arm lock and held her face down to the canvas. From where Tara sat she could clearly see the twin creases between the woman's wriggling legs as she struggled against the hold. To her amazement she could also see the inner labia, pinkly engorged between the outer lips of the sex. The woman really was excited.

The contest was decided when the woman Conor was backing reached down with her free hand and thrust her fingers up into the loser's sex. Tara shrieked in disbelief at the blatant sight of one woman's fingers sinking deeply into another's private crevice, but the audience rose and cheered and clapped. The men ducked back into the ring and the victor was collared and led out, acknowledging the applause. But what followed left Tara even more stunned than anything the day had so far exposed her to. The loser struggled to her knees, and for the first time Tara could see the flaring red patches where blows had landed on her bare flesh, she clasped her hands and theatrically begged her man for something. He stood with one hand gripped in her hair and looked round at the audience. The woman seemed to beg even harder, her pleas drowned by the crowd's noise.

"What d'you think Tara? Thumbs up or down?" Conor shouted at her across the table.

"What?" Tara could hardly hear him and certainly didn't understand what he was getting at.

Conor moved round to sit beside her. "If we give her the thumbs up, it means she's fought well. If we give the thumbs down, she gets a thrashing from her master," he said.

Once again Tara was lost for words and could only stare at the ring. She realised her throat was dry and absently reached a shaky hand for some more brandy. She couldn't really have heard what she thought she just had. But at tables all around her, laughing and smiling men and women were holding out their arms, hands fisted, thumbs down.

The man in the ring smiled back and waved, then dragged his woman towards one of the posts which Tara now noticed had a high pole extending up from it. He dragged the woman to her feet, grabbed her wrists and held them up over her head with one hand while he looped rope which was attached to the pole round them with his other, and then tied it off. Tara couldn't help feeling that the woman could have struggled and made that difficult for him, but she seemed to accept whatever was coming with a strange docility.

On top of all the things she had experienced that day, the sight of a naked woman tied up ready for what Conor called a thrashing, was by far the most perversely thrilling. She noticed how the woman's raised arms gave her back a slender grace as it narrowed down from the shoulders to the waist and then flared out smoothly and broadly over the hips to the wide pillows of the buttocks. Absurdly, Tara found it the most erotically feminine spectacle she had ever witnessed, it captured the essence of woman offering herself to man.

And it pleased this man, and this audience, to beat her.

A whip, consisting of many leather thongs about two feet long was thrown up to the man and he started. Tara flinched when the first lash bit across the buttocks. She couldn't hear it land because of the count of "One!" which went up on all sides. But she saw the woman's back arch and her hips thrust forward, away from the whip. But before the second lash she saw the woman look behind her to see when it was coming and then spread and brace her feet a little farther out from the post. For all the world it looked to Tara as if she was deliberately offering her backside to the whip.

"Two!"

"Three!"

"Four!"

The crowd yelled the count. And Tara saw the red swathes begin to appear on the woman's skin. On and on the count mounted as the whip smacked down, its lashes splaying across the body as it landed. By ten lashes the man had altered his target and was now working across the shoulders and upper back, and Tara noticed with ever mounting incredulity that the woman's body wasn't twisting and arching so violently now, rather the hips were rotating and the back writhing almost as though she was being made love to. She was even looking over her shoulder at the man who was beating her with a look that Tara couldn't fathom. It seemed to be made up of appeal, fear and excitement in equal parts.

"Fifteen!"

"Sixteen!"

"Seventeen!"

At twenty lashes it finally stopped and the woman slumped till her weight was completely taken by her wrists. The man stepped forward and dug the fingers of one hand between her spread legs. Immediately she jolted up again and Tara heard her moan quite plainly as she was penetrated publicly once again. For a few seconds the man worked his fingers inside her and then withdrew, holding his hand up for all to see. Tara couldn't believe, but had to accept the evidence of her eyes. His fingers were glistening with vaginal secretions. The woman had been juicing under the whip! Wild cheering broke out once again, and once again arms were held out but with the thumb pointing up this time.

Tara slumped back in her seat as the woman was led away, a wild swirl of emotion surging through her. Conor poured her another drink.

"Well?" he asked

"It's horrible!.......I mean it's....no........who are these people?" Tara stumbled helplessly with her words as her thoughts failed to collect themselves.