On the Auction Block (20 page)

So far, no one had signed her stomach. She
wondered if any of the other slaves had been marked yet.

She didn’t have to wait long for attention.
Within a few seconds, another voice said, “Come along.” A hand took
hers and pulled her forward. “Stop.” She stopped. “Push forward and
bend over.” She moved forward slightly and found her upper thighs
pressed against something that felt like a leather bolster. She
bent forward until her breasts were pressed against soft leather
and her ass was sticking high in the air. “Spread ‘em.” She spread
her feet and rested her head on her arms.

A cock penetrated her cunt and began working
in her. She had been using the vaginal weights every day and could
hold two ounces for a slow count to two thousand – somewhere near a
half hour. She had no problem working her magic on this gentleman.
It didn’t matter that she was blindfolded. In a couple of minutes,
she was filled with the semen of a man that she had never seen. Or
more likely, a man that she had seen many times, but who had never
seen her naked. His voice sounded vaguely familiar, but she
couldn’t identify him.

“Feels great to me,” the man said. “Way
better than any lady I ever had. You want to try her out?”

The other man didn’t answer. He took her
under the chin and gently raised her off the bolster.

Still silent, he led her away to another part
of the room.

There, he turned her to face him and held her
gently. He began kissing her naked lips.

He kissed well and she returned his kiss in
equal measure.

After a couple of minutes, he laid her on her
back on a mattress.

He lay down beside her and began stroking her
body from shoulder to crotch. She remembered James doing the same
on her wedding night.

When he put his hands to her crotch. She
parted her thighs to admit him.

His lovemaking was slow and a little
perfunctory. Much like James’ had been.

After he came, he rolled off her. “See?
That’s what everyone else is doing wrong. They are treating them
like slaves and trying to see which one fails to respond. They
should be trying to treat them like ladies to see out which one
acts most like a lady. This one has my vote. When I treat her like
a lady, she’s just as much the cold fish as any lady I’ve ever
laid.”

Flame recognized the voice of Lord McCullough
– a man that she and James had invited over to dinner many times –
and cursed herself for falling into his trap. She hadn’t thought to
massage his cock with her newly-trained cunt. She should have
milked him dry, all the time writhing and moaning, and faked a
mighty orgasm of her own when he came. But he was right – when he
treated her like a lady, she automatically fell into her old
habits.

Another voice, a knight named Septimus,
laughed. “Look at the set of her mouth. Angry as only a lady can
be. You’ve got her, all right.”

Flame felt the chill point of a felt pen
write a name across her belly. She could almost feel the letters
spelling
McCullough
. Then the second man did the same. She
was certain that he was writing
Septimus
.

She had her first two votes. She silently
damned McCullough for driving her toward punishment. Two
punishments. The amusing and ingenious one that had been promised
the slave with the most votes; and the special one that had been
designed for her if she were that slave.

Other men saw the writing on her belly as she
lay on the mattress, waiting for instruction and commented on
it.

“Lord McCullough thinks that this is the Lady
Irene,” someone said. “I wonder if he wants to risk a wager on his
choice.”

“While you’re asking him, I’m going to give
her a shot.”

Another man inserted himself between her
thighs.

This time, she put on a performance that was
worthy of a slave.

“I don’t think so,” the man said when he
climbed off a few minutes later.

“Good,” the first voice replied, “because now
I’ve got a hundred plaqs riding on her not being Lady Irene.”

Flame was grateful to McCullough for telling
her his strategy so that she could correct her behavior. But maybe
he had done it deliberately so that he could win more wagers.
Gentlemen risked their money on various wagers constantly and hated
to lose. It wasn’t the money, they had plenty; it was the victory
that they prized.

When she listened, she heard other gentlemen
placing all sorts of bets on the game.

What she overheard told her that she wasn’t
the only slave who had been marked. She could still hope to escape
punishment.

“Come with me, slave,” a new voice said.

She was getting confused by all the voices.
This one, too, sounded familiar, but she couldn’t put a face to
it.

A hand pulled her off the mattress and guided
her across the room.

“Taste this for me.”

She expected to be put on her knees and have
a cock thrust in her mouth. Instead, she was surprised when the man
raised her hand and put something small and moist in it.

“Tell me if it’s worth eating.”

She raised it to her nose. It smelled
delicious. Savory with a hint of something exotic.

She nibbled it and guessed that it was
prosciutto wrapped around a sliced water chestnut with a dash of
sweetened cinnamon. And a bit of fennel straw.

She took another bite, and then finished it
off. She hadn’t eaten anything as delicious as this since entering
the Dodge household.

The man put something else in her hand – a
napkin. She discretely wiped her greasy fingers. She was about to
tell the man to try one because they were exquisite, but realized
the trap. She was not to speak.

Instead, she nodded her approval,
congratulating herself on outwitting the man.

“Raise your hands,” the man said.

When her hands were in the air, he scrawled
his name across her belly. “See,” he said to someone. “No real
slave has such delicate manners. Every other woman in this room
gulped it in a single bite and wiped her fingers on her
thighs.”

A fourth man added his name to the three that
were already scrawled across her abdomen. “You’re a clever man,
Jake.”

Jake Rostrum. Lord of Flatstoke. A man that
James admired for his skill at card games. Flame wanted to cry at
the man’s cleverness.

“It was a mistake to try to identify a lady
with sex,” Jake said. “All cats are black after midnight. It’s the
table manners that make the lady.”

Now she wanted to tell him that he was wrong.
McCullough had identified her with sex. He had tricked her into
giving him cold-fish, lady-style sex.

But she still dared not speak.

It seemed that having four names inscribed on
her belly made her stand out from the other slaves. Suddenly, she
was the most popular girl at the orgy. A rather dubious honor as
she was ordered to her hands and knees and used repeatedly without
a break between men. That stopped after the fifth man in a row
impaled her with his cock; the second of the five to prefer asshole
to cunt.

These men were fast, rough, and impersonal.
She couldn’t tell if they were trying to treat her as much like a
slave as possible in the hope that she would reveal herself by
revolting; or if they thought that she probably was Lady Irene and
wanted to make sure that they could say that they’d fucked Lord
James’ wife the next time they played poker with their friends.

If it was the latter, then they were just
covering their bets but not risking anything by signing her
belly.

Maybe they had already used up their votes by
signing their names on other slaves. Maybe all five had signed the
same slave and she, not Flame, was in the lead for getting
punished.

A girl could dream.

But not for long. Someone ordered her to her
feet and then scrawled on her belly. She didn’t know why he had
chosen her but now she had five votes. That had to be a lot because
there were fewer than three men per slave. Even three votes would
have been more than her share.

Maybe the most recent vote had been
registered by one of the five men who had used her when she was on
her hands and knees or maybe it was someone that she had
encountered earlier – someone who had been spending time with the
others and had been convinced that none of them could ever have
been a lady.

A new voice began speaking in her muffled
ear. “I don’t care if you’re Lady Irene or not. I’ve been watching
you and I think that you’re an exceptional woman. My wife died last
year and I’m not interested in the kind of ladies that keep trying
to trap me into another marriage. They’re a bunch of tight-assed
prudes. I’d like to buy you and spend a year teaching you to be a
lady. If you can show me that you can fit into society, I’ll free
you and marry you. Every man secretly fantasizes about marrying a
slave so that he’ll have a wife who will give him as much pleasure
in the bedroom as he can get in the kennel. The difference between
me and those other men is that I want to make my fantasy come true.
What do you think? Could you act like my slave in the bedroom but
be a lady in the dining room? If you had the right training, I
mean?”

Flame thought about his proposition. It was a
way that she could get what she wanted most, a passionate sex life,
without having to service any man who gave her an order. She would
be a part-time slave of one master.

She nodded.

“Really? You’re not just humoring me, are
you? That would be cruel. You’d really marry me if I could make it
work?”

She nodded again.

He leaned close. She could feel his lips
against her ear through the leather. “Got you, Irene. I got you.
You know why?”

She shook her head.

“Because you listened to my proposal. You
hoped it I would do what I said. No real slave has hope. Ever. When
I offered the same proposal to other slaves in the room, every one
of them either laughed in my face or pushed me away. They knew that
they had no hope of ever being free, no matter what a gentleman
says. You’re the only one who took my jest seriously. Now, slave,
put your hands behind your back.”

When her hands were out of the way, he signed
her belly.

She now had six votes. That had to be enough
to make her the winner of two special punishments.

Three more men used her, each one taking
advantage of a different orifice.

She was exhausted. She didn’t know how these
men could keep getting it up. Surely they were as tired as her. As
nearly as she could remember, she had been used more than a dozen
times. Some of the men, like Earl Jones, were too old to perform at
all. So, if all the other slaves had been used as much as her, then
most of the men in the room must have fucked more than a half dozen
slaves.

Flame doubted that. She didn’t think that it
was physically possible for so many men to have so many erections
in an evening.

There was only logical conclusion. She must
have serviced far more than her share of the gentlemen in the
room.

“Gentlemen, your attention, please.” Thorn’s
voice penetrated to all corners.

Men stopped what they were doing.

“I do believe that every man in the room has
voted. Am I correct? Is there any man here who has not written his
name on the belly of one of the slaves?”

There was silence.

“Then it is time to tally the vote. Give me a
moment to arrange the ladies.”

There was shuffling and milling around.

After a couple of minutes, Flame was grabbed
by the arm and escorted across the room. She was turned around and
placed with her back against a wall. She could feel naked arms
brushing against hers on both sides.

“Gentlemen, as you can see, I have arranged
the slaves in order according to the tally of votes on their
bellies. We have two slaves who were so good, so subservient that
their bellies are unmarked. Lets give a hand to the two slaves who
were perfect.”

There was a scattered round of polite
applause.

“Next, we have one slave with one vote, five
with two votes, and three with three votes. It seems that they
could have tried harder but they did not fail so badly that they
merit punishment.”

There was a brief pause while Thorn walked
down the line, and then Flame felt a hand on her shoulder.

“That, gentlemen, leaves a tie. These two
slaves have each earned six votes. We must break the tie. All those
gentlemen who voted for one of the other slaves must now vote for
one of these two. We won’t bother with the markers. We’ll vote now
with a show of hands.”

Thorn raised Flame’s hand high above her
head.

“Gentlemen, how many of you believe that this
slave, the one marked with a
K
was Lady Irene? Raise your
hand. Even if you already marked her belly, you have to raise your
hand now, to be counted again.”

There was a pause before Thorn returned her
hand to her side and released it.

“And the other slave, who was marked with an
M
?”

Flame struggled to understand. If they had
been arranged alphabetically, then she would have been the eleventh
slave in the line. That was consistent with what she had believed
when they were being lined up – that only one slave was in line
after her, the one marked with an
L
. So where had the
M
come from?”

It didn’t matter.

“The winner, gentlemen, is Slave K!” Thorn
raised Flame’s hand high. “She will be punished for receiving the
most votes, six in the first round, and a full twenty in the
second.”

There was a round of enthusiastic
applause.

Her stomach sank.

“In the tradition of the ancients, this slave
will be crucified.”

Flame felt like she was going to collapse.
Crucifixion was a death penalty.