Knowing the Ropes (15 page)

He groaned. “Jesus, yes! You are making me so fucking hard and hot, Selene. I love your dirty mind.” In a more controlled voice, the voice of the evil master, he added, “I’m putting you back into your cage, slave girl, to think about your behavior, and when I come back, you’d better be ready for me.”

“Yes, Master.” Selene snuck a hand to her pussy, a quick, cautious caress. She was liquid, fiery, probably leaving a stain on the ugly carpet, and she bit her lip to fight the urge to bring herself off.

“Play with yourself, but don’t you
dare
come. I’ll be back shortly.” Then Nick’s voice changed. “Although, I’m actually not going anywhere. Tell me what you’re doing.”

“I’m lying down in my cage—well, really, on my bed. Is that okay? I’m not used to kneeling this long.”

“Go ahead. I only want to break you in fun ways. And you can stop playing with your nipples while you’re getting settled.”

She scrambled onto the bed. “I’m lying in my cage, my legs spread wide.”

“Are you playing with your nipples again?”

“Not yet.”

“Then do it. Pinch them. Pinch them hard. Harder than you were before. Imagine it’s me, and I’m punishing you by torturing your tits.”

She complied. “I’m squeezing them, pinching as hard as I can, using my nails and thinking about clips. Some really nasty ones I’ve seen pictures of, with weights…don’t know if I could handle them, but I’d like to…” At the image that flashed into her mind—her breasts bound tight, swollen from the pressure of the ropes, ornamented with evil yet pretty weighted clips—her breath caught, and for a second, she lost track of what she was saying. “Edge,” she confessed.

“And still not playing with your pussy?”

A desperate whisper. “No, Master.”

And an even more desperate one. “But I need to. Please…”

Nick laughed, a rich, evil chuckle that Selene thought sounded a little strained. “You won’t come until I tell you to, slave. And I may not. But go ahead. Play with yourself. See how many fingers you can stuff into that hot, hungry cunt of yours.”

Her hungry cunt. Yeah, that was what it was right now.

“I’m not even going to bother with one, Master. I know I need more.” She slipped two fingers inside, feeling her inner muscles tighten, milking them. Tight but not full yet. Not what she knew she could take.

She pulled them partway out, worked a third in with them. “Three, Master.”

“Does that feel good? Does it fill you like my cock would?”

What a question! “Feels wonderful…” She pumped in and out, feeling her juices slipping out, still kneading and pinching at her nipple with her other hand. “Not like your cock, but…” She opened her eyes, stared at the disorder surrounding her, let it distract her from the building wave of sensation. “Really, really good.”

“Can you take more?”

Could she? “Oh…my God. Yes! Four fingers. So full. And the angle is perfect. I’m getting my clit too and it’s…wow.”

“More?”

“Can’t, Master.” But damn, it felt good to try. Dirty and depraved and wonderful.

“Imagine you’re in your cage, doing what you’re doing now. I come into the room, catch you at it. Watch for a bit, stroking my cock.”

“How?” It was all she could do to get the word out. The room was fragrant with girl juices, and it no longer felt like pretending she was in a cage in her master’s luxurious tent. With her eyes closed, she was there.

“Lightly, up and down the shaft. Not trying to come, just enjoying the sensation. Enjoying the greedy look on my slave girl’s face, knowing how much she wants the cock inside her.”

Selene’s brain wasn’t functioning at peak, but that was a cue if she’d ever heard one. Besides, it fit in well with what was going through her mind, the only thing she could focus on. “Please, Master. Fuck me. Fuck me hard. Let me come…please.”

“Edge?”

She nodded frantically, forgetting in her frenzy that he couldn’t actually see her. But he seemed to understand.

“Not yet, slave. Present yourself to me for fucking.”

She tried to think what she’d do, could form the mental image of herself on all fours, pressing back against the bars, positioning her pussy just right for him to penetrate her, but couldn’t get the words out. “I do.”

Again, he seemed to understand her situation. “Good girl. Good slave. I get behind you, fit as much of my hands through the bars as I can so I can dig my fingernails into your ass. Can you feel that?”

She used the tit-torturing hand to dig into her own butt instead, astonished how good it felt. Normally, if she’d tried to do that while masturbating, it would have been distracting. Under orders, though, it worked.

“Yes, Master.”

“And the cold bars against your skin?”

“Yes, Master.”

“And my cock, driving into you, hard and fast?”

“Yesss…” Her voice trailed off on a wail. “Edge.”

“Keep going. Don’t stop. Think about me fucking your slave cunt. Because you’re
mine
.” The word came out as a roar, followed by rabid-animal sounds.

Between the noise and the idea of Nick shooting off on himself and the idea of pirate-booted-master Nick shooting into her, Selene didn’t stand a chance.

She had just about enough wits left not to scream her release directly into the phone, but she had no doubt he heard her incoherent stream of “NickNickOhMyGodNickcoming!”

“Keep going,” he urged, his voice harsh. “You might as well enjoy yourself now. Come for me, Selene. Come all your greedy pussy wants to come.”

She did, fucking herself, playing with her clit, arching up as if Nick lay over her and she was meeting his thrusts. Came until she was a limp noodle of a woman, drenched with sweat despite the humming air conditioner. All the while, she heard Nick murmuring encouragement.

Chapter Fourteen

The first coherent thing she said afterward was, “Oops.”

“Oops what? Got the neighbors checking to see if you’re okay?”

“Oops I wasn’t supposed to come until you said I could, and I started without permission.”

Nick laughed. “I’ll let you in on a secret. Sometimes I like to set up challenges that I don’t expect you to win. If you do, you get rewarded. If you don’t, you get punished.” She could practically hear the quotes around
punished
. “But either way, it’ll be fun for both of us. It’ll give you something to look forward to, besides the toy shopping.”

“Really?” Her rational mind had suspected as much when he’d set up the conditions in the first place, but her rational mind had gone pretty far away for a while and wasn’t fully back yet.

“Really.” She could picture his lazy, post-orgasm smile. “Another secret, although you’ve probably figured this one out already: I love making you lose your mind like that. There are a lot of ways to dom someone, and some guys get off on rationing their sub’s orgasms. I can see that for a short time, like we did today.”

An aftershock ran through her, and she shivered pleasurably. “It made me come extra hard when I finally let go.”

“Point. But the whole chastity-belt thing isn’t for me. Very boring. I’ve always figured the best way to get control over a woman isn’t with deprivation and isn’t with pain—except the fun kind. It’s by melting her brain on a regular basis.”

“Damn,” Selene breathed, boneless and content, “I knew I liked you for a reason.”

Later, after a needed potty break and a chance for Selene to deal with her laundry, Nick called her back. “How did you feel about the fantasy?”

“The fifty-two orgasms and eardrum-shattering screams didn’t tell you?” She rubbed idly at her clit through her shorts, not exactly wanting to come again, not sure if she could, but enjoying the warm pleasure.

“No.” Nick’s voice was serious. “That told me it was a hot fantasy, but is that what you want?”

“To be a caged girl who licks boots? Once in a while as a game, sure, but not as a lifestyle. Living in a cage would be hell on your back after a while, and there’d be no room for my computer and all my books. And I think they’d frown on a domestic violence counselor living in a cage.” She wasn’t sure where he was going with this, but if he was worried he’d scared her, she wanted to be clear that the answer was no. At least not in the sense he seemed to mean; she was still a little startled with how quickly she was taking to this, still overwhelmed by her response, the depth of her need.

“Do you think you want to be a slave? Like Alison, more or less?”

Oh my God, what was the right answer to that question?

Her brain and her body had very different ideas.

Honest answer, right answer—if he didn’t like the honest answer, they had a problem, and better to know it now than later. “I have no idea. The fantasy makes me wet. Always has, even before I had any idea what it meant. But I don’t know if I could really live that way.”

“Neither do I,” Nick said softly.

“Do you mean if I could or if you could?”

His answer was, simply, “Yes.”

That reply left her with a lot more questions than it answered, questions she wasn’t entirely sure how to put into words.

There was a future implied here, one that she wasn’t ready to think about, one that she didn’t think Nick was ready to think about either. At least she hoped he wasn’t, because that would scare the hell out of her.

Trying to change the subject, she asked, “Any luck tracking down Natalie?” She crossed her fingers as she said it, prayed there was news and it was good, that Natalie had just been out of touch for some commonplace reason.

Instead, Nick sighed, the kind of heavy sigh she could imagine ruffling her hair even through the phone. “Yes and no,” he said. “Got a number and a post office box from her mom. She talked to her mother a few weeks ago, but I haven’t actually talked to her, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to. She’s not even talking to her mom regularly, and they’re pretty close. I think her master’s screening her calls and telling her who to call back and when.”

A panic alarm went off in Selene’s brain. All her counselor training screamed that this was bad.

In the context of what she knew about Natalie, maybe she could downgrade it to suspicious and possibly bad. Natalie might find it comfortable and reassuring to have things be mostly her master and her, without any outside interference. But being cut off from her own mom?

Not cool.

There had to be some way to get through to her, find out what was really going on. “PO box? No street address?”

“She’s so far out in the boonies that the PO box isn’t even in the town where she’s living.”

“Give me the number,” Selene said. “I think I have an idea. Something that might get her to call back—and might intrigue her dom-master-whatever enough that he’d be okay with it.”

Chapter Fifteen

Her idea was vague, and she spent a long time rehearsing and thinking it through before she came up with the right words, and, more to the point, the right tone to say them in.

A little nervous, a little humble, a little young and drunk on fantasies of the lifestyle, she decided, kind of like the barely-of-age girl from Kinksters, the one who called herself slave kat.

“Hi, Natalie. My name’s Selene.” She tried to think lower case. “Master Nick…sorry, he said to call him Nick…suggested I get in touch with you about…uh, slave stuff. ’Cause Alison, she’s great and everything, but she keeps telling me to take stuff slow, and I know what I need, you know? Just need to figure out how to get there, and it sounds like you have.”

There. Suck-up message left. If the guy she and Nick had started calling the Domly Dick was as arrogant as she suspected, he’d like that his slave was the go-to gal for newbies—especially if he was a Craig kind of guy who might like a crack at the newbies himself.

And if Natalie wasn’t as tightly controlled as they thought…well, she’d call back, because what woman wouldn’t be curious to find out if her ex was actually boinking the ditzy college girl Selene was pretending to be?

July passed into early August. The short summer semester was in full swing, and between that and her part-time job, Selene had been pretty busy. But she and Nick had managed to squeeze in a few more hot dates, a few more afternoons in Garth and Alison’s pool, and plenty more steamy phone-sex sessions.

But no sex-toy shopping trip yet. It had never worked out. Okay, so two times when they’d meant to go, they’d met up at one of their houses first, taken one look at each other and ended up in bed, and the third time, they’d actually been on their way downtown on a particularly sweltering day when Alison called up and invited them to come use the pool.

On a more worrisome note, there had been no calls—for either of them—from the elusive Natalie. It became obvious as the weeks went on that Nick was growing more anxious each day, and that, in turn, made Selene more anxious.

Kind of crazy to worry so much about a woman she didn’t even know, but that was her training. Her calling. Her classes were showing that more and more, even though she hadn’t gotten involved with a hotline yet in Massachusetts—no time yet, between getting settled and the heady whirlwind of meeting Nick.