Iron Dominance (25 page)

“I’m going to shave you down there, dear.”

She swallowed. Eyes still shut.
Mustn’t speak. What did he mean? Oh. Surely not…

“What do you think of that?” And yes, his fingers curled in her pubic hair and pulled.

“There, sir? That would be wicked! People could see my…”

“Who? Who could see? Unless you go about undressed, and that will only happen when I wish it to, in front of people of similar mind to myself.” He tugged again at her hair. “Those who would appreciate this scrumptious body.”

Her mouth was open. She shut it. “Sir, jokes.” She scowled. “As for going about in front of others—”

“Silence. Open your eyes.”

She did so. He regarded her steadily. “For that nasty expression”—his lips curved in a malicious smile—“I shall make certain to fulfill both of those options as soon as possible.”

She spluttered and went to speak.

“Say another word and I’ll gag you. Mmm, plus perhaps, you’d look good on a leash?”

Glaring…glaring would be bad. She blinked fast and held it in. How dare he threaten so? Yet, it made knees turn to water.

Oh, she adored him when he threatened and blackmailed.

Her pussy naked…and how did he mean the rest of her to be? Entirely naked before these others? Her imagination ran wild, and she saw herself paraded before a crowd, her lower body bared, a mask upon her face, and a leash around her neck. Heat swept through her.

Attentive, as always, he noticed, and little wrinkles framed the corners of his eyes. “Ahh. Perhaps you like my ideas after all?” She vigorously shook her head. “Don’t believe you.” He slapped her bottom. “Sit! Over there. Let’s eat.”

How was it that even when he suggested the most abominable things, she grew aroused? Her cunt dampened, even as she tried to think about something else—about
anything
else, except that embarrassing, exciting picture he’d conjured in her mind.

She knelt where he’d pointed, on the other side of the low timber table, and tried not to look cross or disgruntled. She was already in enough trouble.

With Theo sitting up on the sofa and her down on the floor, kneeling and naked, she felt exposed. Her breasts seemed swollen and heavy, and she was acutely aware of her sex between her legs. But apart from admiring her form at times, lingering on her breasts and making her blush with the attention, he stayed where he sat. Watching, smiling, like a big cat with something tasty trapped between its paws.

This was so…different. She’d slipped into this way of life so easily, and now she wondered how she’d ever lived before. True, he controlled her at times like this, but she thrived on it and adored him. She wanted so much to touch him, for him to touch her, and waiting like this under his scrutiny held her spellbound.

The soup and bread eaten, they started on the dessert. Theo placed a small mountain of cream in her bowl.

A dollop of cream fell from her spoon and, swiftly warmed by her body, trickled straight across her nipple.

When she went to grab a cloth napkin, stretching across the table, her breasts swaying, Theo said, deep and throaty, “Don’t touch.” His gaze seared her.

“Allow me.” He reached over, plucked the napkin from her hand. Her chest constricted. She lowered her hands to her thighs, waiting, taut as a violin string.

Careful not to miss a single speck, he wiped her breast clean. His eyes were gray as storm clouds. Her nipple puckered. Would he lick her there, his tongue swirling, soft and hot?

She sat primly back on her heels and resisted squirming.

“You are so,
so
enticing. Time to get to work on you, dear.”

She gulped. The room swayed, and it wasn’t from turbulence.

Grinning, Theo put down the napkin, interlaced his hands, and stretched his arms, palms out, knuckles cracking. “I imagine Dankyo will have only packed essential clothing.”

Relief settled.
Thank the Lord, he won’t have brought the leather multibuckled coat.

“However, I can improvise. Your breasts are underdecorated.”

Her nipples stood out even more, and she had to resist the urge to cover them with her hands.

Her petticoat and dress lay over the sofa’s armrest. He picked up the petticoat, took hold of the laced edge, then proceeded to rip the lace from it.
Such a waste of cloth
. The designer had spiraled the lace up the petticoat in one uninterrupted piece. Soon, Theo had the sofa covered in shreds of cloth and had gathered up several yards of tattered lace. He rose.

She shifted back a little, in apprehension, as he approached. The weight of his hand on her head halted her. “No,” he said. “You’ll like this. I promise.”

She licked her lips as he stood over her, finding the middle of the lace, doubling it over, then finding the new halfway point. He trailed the lace across her, under her breasts, and quickly, efficiently, wove it around her back, to the front, crossing it between her breasts and returning. The lace tightened as he tied it. Being thin-edged, he tested how it pressed on her skin, slipping his fingers here, there, tracing a path under her breasts with those fingers and up to her nape.

She couldn’t help half-closing her eyes at the pleasure, and sighed as he bent and licked where his fingers had been playing at the soft nape hairs.

He drew her earlobe between his lips, tongued her there before exploring inside her ear, while both hands cupped the mounds of her breasts. She had lace circling them and pulling them higher. The smell of him engulfed her—man and oiled steel and fine linen. If he wore cologne, it was the strangest scent, but it stirred her. Her nipples, her earlobe, and everywhere below her waist throbbed rhythmically.

She angled her neck, glancing down at his handiwork. “Mmm.” Her breasts felt cared for, adulated, and indeed decorated. A lace halter neck that accentuated without concealing at all.

“Hands behind your back and wrists together,” he whispered into her ear.

He sank his teeth in her earlobe.
Ah
! She jerked. Gently yet firmly he took both her wrists and drew them to the small of her back. She didn’t resist. She’d done this before, let him bind her. Though the lace was so close to being rope.

Soft cuffs clicked onto each wrist—leather—and before she could speak again, he’d somehow linked them together with the spare lace. She couldn’t separate her wrists, though she tried to. Theo’s hands rested atop her shoulders.

“You won’t get them loose. I can do what I like with you, dear heart. And I will.”

Panting, she sat with her hands fastened at her back, head bowed, feeling what this truly meant.
Naked and tied again
. She shuddered.
Yes.

“Okay? Claire?”

She nodded.

“If anywhere hurts or goes numb, tell me. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.” The words came easier each time she said them. She looked up, found herself entranced by this large, forceful, yet tender man. Then he picked her up, put her over his shoulder, and took her into his bedroom through an adjoining door.

Chapter Twenty-one

For an old airship, the
Final Rebuttal
had some extraordinary design features. Draped over Theo’s shoulder, naked, with her hands fastened behind her back and a bobbing upside down view of the room, Claire barely had time to look. Assassin training meant she could have still sketched the room in detail—though it might have come out upside down.

In the center of the bedroom, twin padded beams, joined in an X shape, with another strut sticking straight up from the middle, towered next to a pair of steel shutters in the floor. The shutters had been rolled back to reveal an oval bathtub-like window of armored glass. The green glass was cross-hatched with wire reinforcing. Clouds feathered past below, and condensed moisture dribbled across the large pane that formed the bottom. The air around this feature of the room was cooler. She shivered, though not entirely from the cold.

“A St. Andrew’s cross,” said Theo. “Or
crux decussate
. I haven’t had occasion to use it for some time.” He smacked her bottom as he swung around, and she jumped at the flare of sensation vibrating into her pussy. He deposited her standing up in front of the cross.

“There.” He pushed until her back and tied wrists touched the cool padded leather. “Stay.”

She looked at the strong features of his face, the heavy lips, iron-hard cheekbones and jaw, the stark black eyebrows above those compelling eyes, and sucked in a breath for strength before nodding.

He bent and kissed her, one hand at the side of her neck, thumbing her jugular furrow, toying with her skin. His mouth squashed down just enough to trap her against the leather. She melted into the cross, and only the knee he placed between her legs kept her upright. He took her mouth, as brutal and methodical as an army taking a fortress.

When he moved his hands behind her and released her wrists from the lace, she did nothing. Only waited to see what he was planning. When he pulled her cuffed wrists up to clip them to chains on the beams above, she let him, trembling as her arms were stretched up high. He slipped his hand between her legs, slid fingers along her cleft, then around her clit, leaving a cooling trail of her moisture.

“I think you like my cross.”

With him inches away, doing
that
, no wonder she was aroused. She squeezed her thighs together.

He kissed her again, before buckling a leather strap across her hips and below her breasts and then kneeling to fasten her ankles to leather cuffs at the base to the cross. His light yellow shirt stretched tight across his back while he worked there. If her arms were free, she might have run her hands over him. The chains above gave very little when she tugged. He’d pulled everything snug, shortened the chains just right to make her feel totally restrained, unable to do what
she
wanted. Her clit felt swollen and hot, as if her body centered there. She shivered at the building tension.

Theo ran his hands up her thighs as he slowly stood. He kissed either side of her mound and belly button, then rose to his full height and went around behind, where she couldn’t see. A double bed covered with a royal blue quilt was to her left against the outer bulkhead. The bathtub glass area dropped away a foot to her right.

The wind howled for a few seconds as it swept past the airship’s hull, and the recessed glass hummed.

“Don’t be scared. You’ll be moving in a second.”

She tensed as something clicked rapidly and the cross tilted back and swung out across the glass. When it stopped with a
clung
, she lay on her back, spread-eagled above the window, the padded limbs of the cross and the strut behind her head supporting her. It took her heart a while to slow.

Theo appeared at her side, gazed down at her while caressing her forehead.
He’s standing on the glass. He trusts it not to break
. She tried to see past him. A long crank handle stuck out just beyond his shoulder.

“This used to be a gun platform. I had it adapted.” Crow’s feet crinkled at his eyes. He walked around her, out of the window tub, past her head, and as he went he slid fingers under the restraints, checking the cuffs and chains. “Wouldn’t want you to fall off this,” he muttered.

She closed her eyes a moment, striving for calm. This position on the cross rang alarms. She could barely move a muscle. When she opened her eyes, Theo was there, and he stroked his thumb across her lower lip.

“Are you okay, Claire? Take a breath. I won’t do anything you don’t want.”

That somehow helped. She had a say.

“What are you going to do…to me?” And saying it that way, saying
to me
put the control back in his hands. She didn’t mind. Her pussy clenched at the flare of lust in his eyes.

“I’m going to shave your little pussy until it’s smooth as a gun barrel. And then I’m going to fuck you there. Does that suit you?”

Oh, yes.

She quivered and got her mouth working enough to say, in a voice that shook and dropped into a whisper at odd moments, “It suits me, though…we could’ve done this elsewhere.”

His brow furrowed at that. “You think so?” Then he leaned over and fisted her hair, biting her neck in a most rapacious way, up into the hollow beneath her chin. His hand wandered between her strapped-open legs, and his fingers speared through her juices, into her entrance, and deep into her tunnel.

“
Unh
.” The suddenness shocked her. Today, slow and steady had gone out the window. Though hopefully not through the one at their feet.

He hooked those fingers upward, pumping, discovering some new delicious spot. She gasped and arched her back against the leather strap. Another pump lingered on that spot, and she writhed, wanting those fingers moving.
More
. When he stopped and pulled out his fingers, then stood, merely watching her, she blinked up at him, openmouthed.

He smiled. “I think this way is worth it, and so do you.”

All that to prove his point? Oh
. The spot inside her pulsed.
Maybe I should argue some more.

Then he ducked away and came back with yet another device made by Henry—all metal and glass and cogs going
clickety click
. After an alarming glimpse of a row of little jaws at the front, she could only endure as Theo hooked up a long air pressure hose from the wall, and proceeded to shave her pussy.

The cold metal teeth made her jump as they cut her pubic hair. With her legs tied in a V, he could see everything down there.

He continually played with her clit and pussy and sometimes dipped a moistened finger into her nether hole while peering up to see how she was doing—still with a smug look on his face—and that only made her squirm and squeal. The man was insufferable, and now, she ached so much down there, she would explode if he didn’t let her come soon.

“There,” he declared. “Done. Now that looks so pretty and…hmm.” He slid a moistened finger along and over the swollen bump of her clit. “Yes. Ready for me.”

Panting, she craned her neck to see where he went and what he did.