Kate and Julia: Slave Girls of the Raj (8 page)

“H… how do you do, Your Excellency,” Penny stammered. Why in heaven’s name had Courtney brought her here? What possible business could this man have with her? The nagging discomfort in her bruised buttocks increased as they clenched nervously, and Penny fought the urge to stare at the slender, white slave whose hair was the same light-brown shade as her own.

Sahar Gul did not greet her. Leaning back in the deep armchair he moved his gaze slowly up from the cream, high-heeled shoes Courtney had made her wear to the blush she could feel staining her cheeks. Self-conscious under his silent scrutiny, Penny lowered her eyes and heard him snort a laugh.

“Better,” he said in almost accentless English. “It is customary for women to bow before they address me, but I am not surprised by her discourtesy. I see she has the usual challenge in her eyes so common among her kind. The
mem-sahibs
are all so convinced of their own superiority.” He stood up, and Penny would have backed away but for the continued presence of Courtney’s hand on her back. It was hard, insistent, controlling. She swallowed. The wazir’s comments had been addressed to him, not her.

The Englishman chuckled. “I believe she is not quite so certain of it as she was a day or two ago, Excellency. You will see why if you care to remove her dress.”

With a very audible gasp Penny turned her head to stare in fearful astonishment at Courtney’s face. “But….” He’s a damned native, she wanted to say, a heathen tribesman hiding behind a thin veneer of civilisation. The white man could not possibly mean to expose her to such a barbarian. Sahar Gul smiled coldly as she looked anxiously into his face.

“It appears she is not enthusiastic about your suggestion, Courtney
Saaquib
.”

The Englishman’s hand slid slowly down the aching curve of Penny’s bottom. “She will warm to it when she understands I have explained to you her wish and that she needs your permission to carry it out, Excellency.”

Penny gasped again as realisation struck her like a slap in the face.

“Then she can remove her dress herself,” the wazir said evenly.

Courtney moved to stand beside him and she saw his face bore the same harsh, uncompromising expression as Sahar Gul’s. “Do it, Penelope,” he said quietly.

Mouth dry, Penny looked at the curious stares of the kneeling slave girls and did not move. Courtney was telling her to strip naked in front of them and some heathen Pathan. Did he imagine she had no pride, no dignity or self-respect? Did he really think she had sunk so low that she would reveal her nakedness to a crude, coarse native just because he told her to? Yet, her whole future depended on the return of Julia and Kate and getting them to Dhokat on time. All her past trials and humiliations would have been for nothing if she refused now. Penny steeled herself.

Her head stopped spinning. The blur at the edges of her vision cleared and she saw the menace in the Englishman’s steady stare. Slowly, she reached her shaking hands to the top button of her dress.

“Let it fall,” Courtney instructed when she had unfastened the last one.

Belly leaping, Penny allowed the dress to slide from her shoulders and drop to the floor.

“You have whipped her,” Sahar Gul observed, frighteningly casual, and Penny lowered her eyes from his appraisal of her nudity. “Is she disobedient?”

“Disrespectful and conceited,” Courtney replied, and grinned at the indignant snort she gave.

The wazir went behind her, and she jerked violently as his hand closed over her buttocks and her discomfort flared into pain.

“Stand still,” he barked. “Put your hands on your hips and get your feet wider apart.”

Pulse racing and gut churning, she obeyed and felt a sudden excitement mingle with her fear at his stern, inflexible command. Oh, heavens! It was happening again.

“It is the way of the
mem-sahibs
,” Sahar said, appearing in front of her and eyeing the rapid rise and fall of her breasts. “They are haughty and proud, and their arrogance makes them slow to obey. I find I punish my white slaves much more often than the others. Yasmeena, show them.”

The white girl rose from her knees and turned to display the angry red welts on her taut, narrow buttocks that told of a recent beating. He had changed her name, Penny realized. Would that happen to Kate and Julia too?

“She has been mine for over a year,” the wazir continued, “and still I must give her a dozen regularly to remind her that her pride has no place here.” He laughed as he tweaked the up-tilted point of one of her small, pointed breasts. “But I will admit she pleases me greatly.”

Penny thought she saw a glint of what might have been pride in the girl’s eyes at that moment, and a small smile on her lips that became a grimace of pain as she obeyed the order to kneel once more. Was it possible the girl had been pleased by his words? Penny was given no time to wonder about it.

“She has good big tits.”

She flinched as Sahar weighed them in his hands, but with the warning of the girl’s red-striped bottom fresh in her mind she did not pull away. Two brown-skinned thumbs rubbed her worryingly stiff nipples and she felt a frightening twitch of anticipation between her legs. The wazir gave her teats a very firm squeeze and looked disappointed.

“A pity she’s not in milk. Look at me.”

Puzzled by his odd remark, Penny was slow to obey. A shiver ran through her as the pressure of his fingers under her chin lifted her eyes to his. The dark, glittering lust she saw set her quivering again and made her gulp.

“Does she perform well?”

“She’s adequate,” Courtney allowed. “Untrained, of course, but quite responsive providing your expectations aren’t too high. Remember, she’s not schooled like a slave girl.”

“Precisely why she interests me.” Sahar gestured at the girl he called Yasmeena. “White slaves I have, but a free white woman, a true
mem-sahib
like the arrogant, immodest ones who treat me so patronisingly at their dinners and cocktail parties – that excites my curiosity.” He began unbuttoning his
chapaan
.

Penny’s heart leapt. Excites was the right word, she realized, as she saw the big bulge in the front of his trousers. At once she raised her eyes, only to find herself looking again into the blatant desire in his own.

A curl of fear and excitement made her belly contract at the same moment as a tingling ripple tickled between her thighs. He was a native, a voice screamed in her head, but her brain could not even control her thoughts, let alone her feelings. Sahar Gul was not old, she found herself musing, certainly much younger than Courtney. His hair was cut in the European way and his brown, clean-shaven face was quite handsome, and he was tall and broad-shouldered too. He was strong, she acknowledged, and not just physically, for he governed the Princedom of Jargahal for its titular ruler. If he could control all of that he would have no difficulty controlling her. Penny’s horror at the thought did not prevent it from feeling deliciously wicked and intensely stimulating. What was it about such men that their casually cruel and offhanded treatment seemed to attract rather than repel her? What had come over her that she became excited by no longer being the user but the one being used? It defied all logic and common sense, as well as her ability to understand it. And it did not matter at all when her blood was pounding through her veins and the warmth of her arousal was tingling low in her belly.

“I confess, Courtney, that I was surprised when you told me a
mem-sahib
was anxious to visit the slavers in the mountains. It is much more usual for a beautiful white woman to keep as far away from them as possible.”

With almost hypnotic fascination, Penny watched Sahar unbutton his trousers as he spoke. Her breath escaped in a rush when the last one came free and his thick manhood sprang into the open.

“She is either very brave or very foolish,” he said.

“Or perhaps only very desperate,” Courtney chuckled.

“Or perhaps all three.” Sahar took a step that poked his erection into Penny’s stomach. It seemed as hard, implacable and demanding as the look he was giving her. “On your knees, white woman.”

He was a native. He should not be giving her orders as if she was one of his slaves. And she should not be obeying them. Fear, abhorrence, shame and excitement were all sending shivers through her.

Stunned, Penny felt herself sink to her knees, her conscious will powerless against the need – Oh, Lord, the desire! – to do whatever he told her to. Her belly felt hollow but her excitement was raging, a craving beyond her control. She stared at the thick flesh rearing up before her.

“You know what to do,” he said flatly.

They were all watching, Penny thought. They would see every intimate movement of her lips and tongue – Courtney, the white girl and the Indian one, and Sahar Gul himself, looming over her, arrogant and imperious. She raised her eyes to his and the curling, cringing humiliation of what he was forcing her to do made her blood pump faster and the tremors quicken within her. It
was
happening again, she thought desperately, but desire far outweighed despair, and if she refused she would lose everything and she would be whipped again. Taking a deep breath, she parted her lips.

The wazir pushed his fingers into the thick waves of her hair, gripping her skull and thrusting himself vigorously into her open mouth.

Penny wanted to reach down and chafe her trembling sex but it was difficult with Sahar’s big baton plunging so fast and half-choking her each time it jabbed into the back of her throat. Her eyes watered, and she gagged around the hardness between her lips. Yet, she dared do nothing but let it happen and, to her utter shame, wish it was her pussy he was using so roughly.

His hand tightened in her hair, forcing her head back and tilting her face up. He pulled from her mouth and she saw his hand begin pumping furiously and reflexively shut her eyes. A heartbeat later something splattered wetly into Penny’s face. She tried to twist in his grip but could not escape the thick, viscous fluid spraying over forehead, nose and cheek as he huffed and grunted his way through his climax. Breathing hard through her nose, Penny kept her lips clamped as the warm goo flowed slowly down her face towards them. She had never even allowed a white man to do such a thing to her before.

“Here, Yasmeena,” she heard the wazir order, and opened her eyes a crack to see the English slave kneel before her. Penny would have shied away, but Sahar Gul’s controlling hand still gripped her and she had no choice but to submit as the girl scooped some of the slimy fluid from her cheek with a finger.

“Open,” the wazir barked.

Penny’s stomach lurched in horror. She had thought she had at least escaped having her mouth filled. As Yasmeena held the slimy stuff under her nose the Englishwoman reluctantly accepted she had been sadly mistaken. Avoiding the searching look in the girl’s eyes she opened her mouth and let the white slave drip the fluid onto her tongue. It tasted just as sour and foul as Courtney’s did.

Yasmeena scraped every drop from Penny’s face and fed it to her, while the wazir continued holding her head and she cringed inside and half-choked on the puddle collecting in her throat.

“Many times I have imagined my seed on the faces of the haughty, white
mem-sahibs
, Courtney,” Sahar Gul said as the girl finished her task and drew back. “It is most satisfying to have finally really done it to one of them.” His hand tightened on Penny’s skull. “Look at me,
Mem-sahib
Winter, and swallow.”

Staring up into his eyes in an agony of humiliation, she forced the horrid, bitter stuff down to her crawling stomach and fought the instant urge to puke it back up. Sahar drew her to her feet by her hair. With one hand he grasped the heavy roundness of one bare breast and slipped two fingers of the other into her slick warmth. His face split into a grin.

“She is aroused, Courtney. See, her bud is sticking out. It seems that not all
mem-sahibs
are cold, unfeeling bitches.” His thumb grazed the swollen bud and made Penny gasp at the tickle of excitement it created. His hand withdrew and she smelled her musk on the fingers that lifted her chin. “She seems prepared to put up with a great deal to find these missing girls of hers. They must mean a great deal to you, woman, for you to attach such importance to recovering them.”

“Th… they do,” Penny agreed, flinching under his hard stare.

His laughter was not at all comforting. “Then let’s see how far you are willing to go.” He pointed to a wooden platform that stood on its own close to one wall of the room. “Go and kneel on that.”

Yasmeena’s sharply indrawn breath added to the trepidation already filling Penny as she obeyed. She did not fail to see the rack on the wall nearby with an array of fearsome-looking canes and whips that filled her with a hollow dread. Trembling, she climbed onto the platform, a box-shape about five feet long and three wide, its surface padded with dark-brown leather. A vertical steel post was fixed to the centre of the long edge at either side, their upper ends joined by a wooden crossbar.

“Reach up and grasp the bar,” Sahar said as he approached her, and Penny looked nervously over her shoulder and saw Courtney grinning cruelly. She groped her shaking hands upwards until her fingers curled around the wood. To reach, she had to kneel upright with her thighs pressed together. “You will keep holding it until I say you can let go,”

the wazir said. “Do it sooner and you can forget any idea of going into the mountains.” He went to the wall rack. “She’s felt the cane already, Courtney, from the look of those stripes on her backside.”

“The whip and strap too, though only the lighter sort,” Courtney replied.

“Then we’ll see how she deals with something heavier.”

Penny’s heart thudded as Sahar took a broad leather strap attached to a chequered wooden handle from the rack. The instrument was thick and heavily stitched. It was going to hurt horribly. The wazir would not be lenient. She knew she was a surrogate for every white woman who had ever patronised and disdained and insulted him. He meant to extract his revenge from her. Penny gulped. Should she call a halt before her suffering began? But to do that would mean her losing both the girls and her only chance of restoring her fortunes. She could not bring herself to waste everything she had been through already. Taking a deep breath she summoned all of her determination. It was a surprise as well as a relief when Sahar announced she would receive only six strokes, but the latter was short-lived.