Pam-Ann (32 page)

Rafael had also resigned, though
he had not known then that he was soon to be a rich man. Even with
his future uncertain, he had not hesitated to spend a considerable
sum of money buying Pam.

“Pam!” Rafael said sharply,
jolting her from her reverie.

“Excuse me,
M…
Master.”
It was one of those times
the word seemed to stick in her throat.

“I was telling Alex about your
latest idea. Stand up and show him.”

She looked up self-consciously.
Pam had
a feeling she would never get
used
to being semi-naked most of the time.
She still
felt that strange mixture of absurd pride and gut-shrinking
humiliation when she
was bare-breasted in
public,
being led on her leash by her handsome Master. But
Riley was different from the people she saw on the street or in
stores and restaurants. He had been there in the beginning, helping
strip her and discovering the
zipper
on her
skirt. And Rafael had had to tell him the truth about where she and
the
zipper
had come from. He had accepted
it surprisingly calmly, but
he now knew as well as
Rafael did
that women in her world were not
chattels and did not expect to be treated as such. The knowledge
increased her embarrassment as Pam got to her feet.

“May I call the others?” she
asked and, when Rafael nodded assent,
summoned
them. Daisy and
Persephone
entered the room, dressed in the
same way
that Pam was.
She lined up with the two girls. Embarrassed,
but also rather pleased, she watched Riley lean forward in his
chair with obvious interest.

“I see.” He licked his lips. “It
does a similar job to a corset but with a lot less material.”

“And in a very interesting way,”
Rafael said, with a grin for Pam.

“Take your loincloths off so I
can see better,” Riley instructed.

Rafael’s gaze met Pam’s and he
gave a thin smile and a challenging quirk of one eyebrow. She
ignored her belly’s fluttering. She
dared
not embarrass her Master by hesitating,
let alone
refusing to obey. That might get her the sort of punishment she
most definitely did not want, though she had had precious little of
any kind since the day Rafael had bought her. He had certainly not
neglected her in other ways. She spent every night in his bed, but,
apart from a few light punishments when she had deliberately
overstepped the mark to provoke him, he had not beaten her the way
she had expected him to. It was puzzling. At times, it was also
intensely frustrating.

Along with Daisy and Persephone,
Pam
let her covering fall and tried not to
look at the pink tip of her
clit
peeping
out from its folds. It was so often that way, that it felt almost
normal now, like the constant background tingle of excitement and
arousal in her sex and belly and brain. As the feeling grew, Pam
avoided looking at Rafael but she knew he was staring as avidly as
Riley
at her latest ‘invention’.

The engineer had the girls walk
to the open doors to the patio and then return. He got up and eyed
each of them in turn, Pam in white satin, Daisy in red and
Persephone in black, with high-heels and silk stockings to match.
There was no nylon in Pam’s new world.

Riley grinned. “I can see the
appeal,” he said, and his bulging trousers confirmed the
statement.

“Women like them too,” Pam said,
forgetting to ask permission to speak.
Her glance
at him showed Rafael did not mind.
He was relaxed about that
except in company. “They make them feel… stimulated.” She giggled
and looked away.

“And they look very stimulating
too,”
Rafael
said.

Pam’s pussy prickled.

“I know you,” Riley said to
Daisy. “You were on the
Empire’s Triumph
.”

“Yes, Master,” Daisy answered.
Pam had had no difficulty persuading Rafael to buy her when the
money from the
zipper
sales had begun to
arrive.

“And I remember Persephone, of
course,” the engineer continued. “Your new life’s pretty different
from the old one, eh? I hope you’re enjoying what you’ve got
yourself into.” He was unaware she was not the girl he had known.
The fewer who knew, the better.

“Yes, Master!” The girl had been
painfully meek to begin with. Only when it had dawned on her that
she was not going to be flogged for looking up when someone spoke
to her, or having to ask a question
about the many
things
she did not understand, had she begun to come out of
her shell. Pam had not yet managed to get much information out of
her about where she came from but she was slowly gaining her
confidence. She had discovered that the girl had been the lowest of
the low in the slave hierarchy she had tried to
describe
. Pam already had plenty of reasons to be
grateful the blackness had unaccountably taken Persephone and left
her. The girl’s story had given her another.

“What are you doing, Alex?” the
most important reason asked.

“I need to get on the telegraph
to New York,” Riley said, scribbling in a small notebook he had
taken from his pocket. “I’ll need to take those back with me so we
can make patterns. What do you call them?”

“It’s a
garter
belt,” Pam said, and he scribbled again.

“And it isn’t going anywhere and
neither are you,” Rafael added. “Don’t you have something else to
take care of first?” He nodded at the tented front of the man’s
pants. “You came here for a rest. Up to now all you’ve done is talk
business, and you’ve never stopped working since the day you left
the Company. You said yourself you’re a wealthy man. It’s time to
relax and enjoy it.”

Pam hid her smile by rubbing a
finger on the tip of her nose. She was still getting used to
Rafael’s new attitude. He had left the stern disciplinarian devoted
to nothing but duty behind on the
Empire’s Triumph
. She was
not complaining, since it meant
they were
frequently
in one another’s company
,
but she did miss the discipline
at times. At
others she felt frustratingly confused, and that was not a feeling
she could ever get used to.

“What you should do is take your
slaves, go to your room and enjoy yourself,” Rafael continued. “Or
if you prefer you can take one of mine.” The look he gave Pam was
challenging once more.

She did her best to keep her
disappointment
from showing on her face.
He had said the same when Eve had visited them
three weeks previously, hinting that Pam was just as available to
her as were Daisy or Persephone, or any of the dozen other slave
girls who were needed to look after Rafael’s large, new home. He
had also presented her with another problem she was having
difficulty adjusting to. Without saying anything to her about it,
Rafael had somehow manoeuvred Pam into taking charge of the running
of his household, though she did not think she was very suited to
the role while she was still learning about her new
world.

Though she was
unsure whether he would have made her go through with it, Pam had
been relieved when Eve had merely glanced in her direction with a
perceptive smile and declined Rafael’s offer. Well, mostly she had
been relieved. While it embarrassed her to admit it, she could not
deny she had enjoyed her experience with Eve when they had been on
the airship. At least now, Pam thought she understood why she had
responded so eagerly to the caresses of other women, and
become
aroused despite the painful torments
Persephone had put her through. The Venus Dust might have been
phoney but her suppressed desire after two years of celibacy was
not and, if she was completely honest, she had discovered there was
something different and not entirely unappealing about the way a
girl made love to her. Though the pleasure did not compare to that
she felt with Rafael,
perhaps it was as well that Eve had
bought herself an island in the British Caribbean, surrounded
herself with her Sapphic friends and a large number of slave girls,
and was not likely to be a regular guest in Rafael’s home. Pam
glanced at him and a flutter teased low in her
belly. Sometimes she was utterly shameless.
But that was how
a slave girl was meant to be.
Again she felt a
pang of regret and the annoying frustration that had been
increasing with each day that had passed since the one when Rafael
had bought her.

Eve had adjusted quickly after
she had opened the envelope Persephone had given her and discovered
the girl’s wealth was all hers. Even after Traske had cashed his
cheque she was still the richest woman in the world.
She
was far too sensible to let it go to her head as it
had to Persephone’s.
Eve
had only brought
two slaves with her on her visit, Tania and Milly, and neither had
been complaining about their change of ownership.

Why Persephone had left nothing
for the version of herself she must at least have suspected would
appear in her place, Pam had no idea, but it had made turning the
new arrival into a slave far less complicated. She would not have
lasted five minutes alone before giving herself away, and she was
so submissive she could not possibly have managed without help.
Disregarding the fact she had a ticket, Rafael had taken her to the
London Slave Registry
and filled out the necessary
paperwork. All that was needed was a simple declaration by a girl
that she had stowed away and the new Persephone had unhesitatingly
given it. No one had queried her enslavement. She was still in awe
of Rafael but not so much as in the beginning, though her surprise
seemed to increase as each day passed without him whipping or
caning her. And she was only beginning to understand that although
he looked identical to the man she had known in her version of
reality, he was not at all the same.

“Come on,” Rafael chided, when
Riley continued to stand with his pencil poised above his notebook.
“We’re paying those people in New York City a lot of money to run
things smoothly. They can manage for a week without you, or better
still, two weeks.” He chuckled. “And if you don’t do something
about that hard-on soon you’re going to bust that new
zipper
on your pants.”

Riley laughed and put his
notebook in his pocket. “You’re right, I ought to be enjoying the
fruits of our success. Come on you two, time you showed me you’re
worth all that money I paid for you.”

Pam saw the slave girls exchange
grins as they got to their feet, the white girl in a narrow black
loincloth and black enamelled collar, the brown-skinned girl, once
one of the Zulu stokers Riley prized so highly, in white. They were
beautiful, big-breasted and generously curved. Eyeing the red weals
on the white girl’s bottom as the slaves followed their Master from
the room, Pam felt another twinge of envy. Rafael’s dark gaze,
intense and smoky with desire, turned on her. Her pussy
tightened.

“Time I took my own advice,” he
said. “Daisy, take Persephone with you and find something to amuse
yourselves.”

The girls picked up their
discarded loincloths and, with Persephone looking as surprised as
always at being allowed time for herself, disappeared onto the
patio.
Since Rafael had shown no interest in using
either of them, or any of the other slave girls, Pam could make a
pretty good guess at what they would be getting up to.

“You won’t need that,” Rafael
said as Pam reached for her own scrap of silk. He lay on the broad
sofa and began unbuttoning his shirt.
Sure he
would expect it
, Pam hurried to assist him, but he grabbed
her and pulled her on top of him. The quivering in her belly
reached her sex. His hand slid down the curves of her buttocks to
where they met her thighs and drew them apart. Pam shifted and felt
the hard length of his erection pressing against her abdomen. She
looked into his eyes, saw them smoulder and felt tremors tease her
sheath. Dampness bathed it as tingling warmth spread across her
skin and centred between her legs. She pressed her hard nipples to
his bare chest.

“What was so interesting about
Alex’s slaves?” Rafael asked.

She had not known he had seen
her looking. “They were very beautiful. Much more than me.”

“Not true.” He smiled and she
smiled back with the warmth in her heart increasing along with that
in her sex.

Pam fought down
her excitement. If she allowed herself to become wholly aroused she
would let him evade the issue, just as he had every other time she
had tried to bring it up.
“He keeps them in collars,” she
said, more to the point, and conscious of the bareness of her own
neck. “And he punished the one called Sue recently.”

He shrugged, and his
hard
cock rubbed her belly
through his pants
. “That’s up to him. They’re his
slaves.”

“No, that’s not what I meant.”
On the bridge of the airship she had made her choice in a single
beat of her heart and,
for a reason she would
never know for sure,
the blackness had let her. It had been
a conscious, willing choice.
There had been times
since then Pam had come close to wishing things had worked out
differently. The submissive, pain-loving girl that she could now
admit dwelt within her wanted to be Rafael’s slave girl, but the
other Pam, the controlled, independent and self-reliant one, could
not escape the feeling that her life should consist of more than
kneeling at her Master’s feet and instantly obeying him in all
things.
She screwed up her courage.
“I… I
think you need to tell me where I stand.”