Knowing the Ropes (26 page)

Selene had boundaries, though. He could trust her to let him know how she was doing, to use her safe word if it were more than she could handle.

If she was ready to heat things up a few dozen degrees, then he’d give it to her.

With pleasure.

Usually he’d warm her up with light spanking until her bottom was rosy, then work up from light, percussive pops with the paddle, interspersed with lots of stroking and kissing, pinching at the tender places, tracing the letter imprint and then soothing the hurt, playing with her plump nipples and fingering her juicy pussy until she was panting and slick and begging for more.

Only then would he strike her more heavily, knowing that she was ready to transmute pain into ecstasy.

Not tonight.

The paddle cracked down on her lovely ass.

Selene shrieked, bit her lower lip, then glared at him.

And while she was still glaring, he struck again. Several more whacks followed in rapid succession. Selene stopped shrieking after the third but continued to gasp with each blow.

After about eight, Nick stood back, studied the red effect of his handiwork, “Naughty” repeated several times in bold white letters against a rosy ground. It was starting to get hard to read, though, from overlapping blows. Before long, he hoped it would be illegible.

“Should have gotten the SLUT one,” he growled. “Or better yet, CUNT. That’s what you are, isn’t it? A cunt.”

He smacked her again. “Isn’t it?”

When she didn’t answer, Nick grabbed a handful of her hair, pulled her head back roughly. “Answer me when I talk to you.”

“Sorry, Master,” she said, her voice gloriously meek and quavering. “I…I couldn’t catch my breath.” She breathed in and out a few times before answering the question he’d asked—but not the way he’d expected. “No. I’m not a cunt.” A second’s hesitation. “Master. I have a cunt. But I’m not one.”

Nick felt like Jekyll and Hyde.
Cunt
was a word that women reacted to strongly—it made them either hot and bothered or just bothered, and part of him loved Selene for saying how she really felt instead of giving him the pat answer he’d expected, under pretty trying circumstances.

His inner caveman growled in frustration, and at the same time, in arousal. She’d begged to be broken. He wouldn’t break her, not really, but he’d be happy to bend her. Soften her up. Make her yield.

And by the end of the night, she’d agree she was a cunt or any other damn thing he suggested—because by then she’d want to.

“You’re not a cunt?” He ran two fingers along her slit, scooped away some of her juices, moved so he could show the thick slickness threading between his fingers. “What other kind of woman gets wet when she’s tied up and paddled?”

“A wanton one. A sexual one. A horny one. A slut, even.” Selene hesitated, then added, “One who wants you very much, Master.”

The inner nice guy, the one who’d fallen hard for Selene, wished she’d said
love
instead of
want
.

The inner caveman crowed at the admission of how much she wanted him.

“Do you want me? You’ll have me, little one. But first you have to admit you’re a cunt.” There, that ought to set up a nice little dilemma in her mind, the kind of thing that should turn her brain to Jell-O by defeating any effort to think logically. “Admit you’re a cunt and take whatever I choose to give you. But I know you’ll do that, because you love it, and that’s why I say you’re a cunt.” He didn’t give her a chance to answer, just started paddling her again.

She didn’t seem to know how to react. Her eyes were bright with tears that she wouldn’t shed, and she was biting her lip to keep from screaming, and her ass looked like it was on fire. But still her nipples were hard, her pussy gleaming.

And still she would neither safe-word nor call herself what he wanted to hear, either one of which would have stopped the pain and let him give her the sound but tender fucking his cock ached to administer.

Wet pussies didn’t lie, he figured. And in his experience, neither did Selene.

If she wasn’t using the safe word yet, she must be all right.

Soon it would be time for the cane.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Selene’s ass was ablaze and so was her brain.

She’d asked for this, begged for it. Begged Nick to break her.

That meant she had to take it, didn’t she? Otherwise she’d be a wannabe, a smart-ass masochist who topped from below, a poser, all those terms Natalie had thrown around, scarcely bothering to hide that she was talking about Selene.

Besides, she deserved it. Deserved to suffer for pushing at Nick’s emotions, forcing him into a declaration of love he wasn’t ready to make.

Worse, she wanted it. Needed it. Nick was right about that, although she wasn’t sure she could admit it to him even if she could get her brain and her lips in synch.

It wasn’t fun pain, but it balanced the pain inside, the pain of knowing how badly she’d fucked up.

And for non-fun pain, pain that shouldn’t have been any more enjoyable than having a root canal, it was making her awfully wet.

Not the pain, perhaps, but the yielding. The knowledge that she’d put herself completely into Nick’s hands, that intense as this scene was, her only choice now was to trust him and endure.

Trust. That was why she was enduring, why she wanted him to break her open, to get past the fear and doubt and emotional blackmail and back to the trust.

Every muscle in her body cried out for release, relief from the challenging position he’d put her in, and her ass was on fire, and open as she was, the paddle sometimes caught still more tender areas—her anus, her swollen pussy lips.

Then she’d scream.

But she wouldn’t use her safe word. She refused to use her safe word, to admit her wimpiness. It was only a paddle, dammit. Not a singletail, not a riot whip, not a knife, not any of the implements Nick had used on Natalie when they were together and that Natalie had described to her in breathless, wet detail. This was nothing. Just a paddle, used harder than usual.

Dimly, as the pain built, as the paddle cracked down again and again on her tender ass cheeks and reddened thighs, she knew she was dripping.

And why shouldn’t she be? She was a cunt in the sense that Nick meant.

But she couldn’t bring herself to say it, not after hearing Molly’s father shouting it at Molly’s mother, not once, but often, usually coupled with
worthless
. She hadn’t known what it meant then, just knew instinctively it was a terrible thing to call someone.

Nick didn’t mean it that way. He meant a woman who liked sex, who gave herself shamelessly to pain and pleasure, and she certainly was that. He just wanted her to say it in the starkest, most embarrassing way possible. And she couldn’t.

This was beyond the level of pain she thought she’d wanted, but she found she could take it, take joy from knowing she was taking it. Each blow made her tense her buttocks—and each time she did that, she tightened around the toy inside her and felt surges of pleasure rippling out to meet the surges of pain.

Finally he stopped, ran a hand softly over her hot, tingling bottom. The touch soothed her, and when he smiled a smile of sweet evil and whispered, “Good girl. Good, brave girl. That was new for you, wasn’t it?” she swore the pain melted into waves of… Well, her ass was still throbbing and sore, but it was a good kind of throbbing and sore, the kind she didn’t ever want to stop.

And when he ran his fingers over her slick, swollen pussy, smiled approvingly, then ever so casually circled her aching clit…she surged, tried to arch to meet his touch against the chafing rope, cried out her pleasure as she convulsed around the toy inside her and some of the almost-unbearable tension melted away on a river of bright pleasure.

Interrupted by a slap on her inner thighs and pussy lips.

The slap itself, in her erotic haze, was sharp ecstasy, just one more strong sensation that would push her toward another orgasm.

Nick’s words were what made her plummet back down to earth. “Who said you could come, you worthless cunt?”

Several things—all very bad ideas to say at the moment—flashed into her mind.
You never said I couldn’t
and
Mother Nature, asshole. It’s what happens when you play with a woman’s clit
featured prominently.

But what actually came out of her mouth was, “I’m not worthless. Never call me worthless. Ever. Especially not a worthless cunt. Or I walk.”

Everything slowed to a creepy, horror-movie version of slow-motion. Nick’s eyes went wild, and Selene thought he looked as panicky and miserable as she felt. He opened his mouth, and for a second that might have lasted ten minutes, she thought he might apologize, untie her, cuddle her, start things again from a different, better place.

Then a layer of ice seemed to form over his beloved features. She’d seen him do the cold, distant act, though never for long, but it was definitely an act; beneath the detached mask, he’d been engaged, eager. This time he seemed to go somewhere else, leaving a stranger—a handsome but cruel stranger, frightening yet paradoxically seductive to Selene—in his place. He was still fully dressed, which wasn’t his usual habit when they played, and that made him seem even more a stranger.

“Maybe not worthless,” he said. “But worth more with stripes.”

He turned around, grabbed a thin, flexible rattan cane from the antique umbrella stand near the bed.

For a second, Selene was grateful he chose a thin one. Surely it would hurt less than some of the ones in the collection—the heavy Lucite, the fiberglass rod that looked like a conductor’s baton and that had left a narrow but deep bruise on her thigh when she’d surreptitiously tried it on herself, the metal one.

He whipped it through the air a few times, making sure she heard the whip it made, making sure she saw how it flexed, eager to strike.

“Get ready, cunt,” he barked.

She heard the cane, felt the wind of its passage, prepared for a new sensation—a frightening yet seductive one like this new, harsher face of Nick.

The cane crashed into the mattress beside her. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the dent it left in the sheets.

Tension she hadn’t realized she’d been holding left her body. He wasn’t going to back out—it wasn’t that kind of night—but he wasn’t going to hit her that hard, either.

And then he did.

She screamed, not a cry of pleasure but the furious and frightened bellow of a wounded animal. Somewhere underneath the fiery pain was the possibility of pleasure, but it was too distant to reach right now, just like Nick was too distant, the way he wasn’t meeting her eyes when she looked at him, trying to get his help transmuting this agony into something she could bear because it pleased him.

“Had enough?” he asked. “Do you need to use your safe word?”

Selene gathered a breath around the remains of the scream, around the shocking line of fire across her ass, around the tears that she refused to shed, tears less of pain than of confusion and fear. The safe word danced on her tongue, ready to be spoken, ready to save her from more lines of fire, more of Nick’s humiliating words and weird, distant, angry attitude.

Then she remembered Natalie and decided to tough it out. If that little bony thing could take this—and while that Cirque du Soleil body of hers was sexy, it had absolutely no padding to absorb blows, unlike Selene’s ampler form—so could she. Take what Nick wanted to give her. Show she was tough but yielding.

Not worthless, but worthy.

Biting her lip to keep the safe word—and/or a really ill-advised taunt of
do your worst
—inside, Selene shook her head.

Five more stripes, and with each, Selene held on with tooth and claw, with pride and determination, with a fierce need to prove something to Nick, although by the second blow she couldn’t have possibly explained what that something was anymore.

On the fifth, though, she flinched hard enough that she managed to wiggle away slightly.

But not in the right direction.

The cane, already in motion again, caught her not across the fleshy curve of her ass but across the thighs and the clit and labia.

A hand-slap there was intense but arousing.

This was unbearable. Knifelike intensity, fire radiating through her lower body. She was sure she must be bleeding.

At the same time, she was sure the wetness she felt was pussy juice, because despite the pain, despite the shock, or maybe because of it, she felt herself convulsing around the balls inside her as if he’d done something exquisitely pleasurable instead of exquisitely painful.

“Too much,” she sobbed. “Too much.”

He positioned the cane as if he planned to use it again.

“No!” she begged. And then, meeting his eyes, realizing what she had to do, “Red. Red, goddamit, red!”

As he threw down the cane, Nick’s demeanor changed from distant to intensely, dangerously present, from cold to…she wasn’t quite sure what. A mix of concern and something negative.

Probably disgust at her for safe-wording.

But she couldn’t tell because she couldn’t really see through the tears.