Pam-Ann (33 page)

Rafael laughed softly.
“
Wherever I order you to. That’s what slave girls
do – obey their masters.”

Pam’s heart sank. “I’m serious,
and I… I’m confused too. These last weeks we’ve been together… I
don’t know what I’m supposed to be, or… or what I want to be. There
are times you call me slave and treat me like one, and others when…
well, I’m not sure how you’re treating me. I need to know what you
expect from me, what I am to you. And if it’s just another slave
you should put me in a collar, like Riley has with his girls.” That
was not what she wanted but at least she would know once and for
all what she meant to him.

“Is that what you want? Aren’t
you happy, sweetheart?” Rafael frowned as he spoke but Pam got the
feeling it was not her muddled protest that had caused his
annoyance.

“No. Yes. Oh,
hell, I don’t know any more! No one has ever made me feel the
things I feel with you. No one has ever made me
want
to feel half of them.” She saw a
thin smile play across his lips.

“So that’s the
reason for
all your little provocations lately? You’ve been
trying to get yourself punished.”

She pushed out her bottom lip,
refusing to blush. “It didn’t work very often.”

“More often
than you imagine
, but I’ve been going easy on you.
You’ve told me a lot about your world, including
that women don’t get beaten where you come from.”

“Well, it does happen there
sometimes. A lot of people aren’t comfortable with it, like the way
the Sapphics are treated here, though it’s not illegal.”

“And it happened to you,” Rafael
said. It was not a question.

“There was a man,” Pam
confessed. She had started this. She had no choice but to finish.
“I… I let him tie me up and beat me. I thought I loved him but I
didn’t. What I loved was the things he did to me.” This time her
cheeks flushed hotly.

“What makes you so sure it
wasn’t because you loved him?”

Pam swallowed. “Because now I
know how it really feels to be in love.” She made herself meet
Rafael’s eye. His smile made her heart race and her pussy
ripple.

“With someone who needs to tell
you where you stand?”

“Yes,” Pam said.
To be sure that she loved him was one thing. To have to
continue living with her confusion and uncertainty was quite
another.

Rafael
stroked her bottom again. “I thought after I lost my temper and
flogged you…. And when the black thing appeared….” His hands
clasped her flesh
and sent a delicious tickle
through her pussy.
“And then it was rushing towards us and
you were rushing towards me.” He jiggled her buttocks and his laugh
made her heart turn over. “By God, I was never so pleased in my
life. I knew I had to let you go but I was still so afraid of
losing you.
I don’t ever want to feel that way
again, sweetheart. I don’t ever want to do anything that might stop
you wanting me.”

“You never
could,” Pam said, with more certainty than she had ever felt about
anything before. “It’s just that I don’t know what you….” Her sex
responded to his exploring hands with a ripple and a surge of damp
heat. She forced her rapidly fluttering eyelids to remain open long
enough to look at him and then quickly lowered them as a new blush
flamed on her cheeks.
“I… I like it when you hurt me. I told
myself it was the Venus Dust Persephone gave me, until I found out
it wasn’t real at all. Then I knew what I truly was. And I knew
what I truly wanted.”

“For me to beat you,
sweetheart?”
Rafael’s words were pitched low,
mellow and sensual.

They made Pam
look up, and t
he simmering heat she saw in his deep-brown
eyes made
her
sheath contract as if he was
already inside her. She nodded. “Don’t you want to?”

“God, yes! There’s no pleasure I
know that could come close. I’ve been waiting
and
hoping that you would find the courage
to tell me.
Waiting
until you were ready to trust me
completely.”

Excitement swelled in Pam’s
breast. “I do trust you.
I… I guess I could try to
get used to being your slave girl, as long as I know that’s what
you truly want me to be.”

Rafael did not
reply. Aware that he had avoided the issue once again, Pam allowed
her disappointment to slip away, when he chuckled and snapped one
of her suspenders sharply against her skin.
She shuddered at
the sting and more tremors teased her sex.

“Will you put me in a collar?”
she asked, voice husky with rising passion. “Will you whip me?”

He looked deeply into her eyes.
“I’d love to whip you, but is it really what you want,
sweetheart?”

Pam’s heart was too full for her
to speak. She nodded, looking at him through prickling tears of
longing and happiness
, her frustrations
temporarily forgotten amid her rising excitement.

Rafael carried her upstairs and
suspended her by her wrists from the shiny steel hook set into one
of the roof beams of the bedroom. He took off her garter belt and
the brush of his fingers as he rolled her silken stockings down her
legs quickened the pulse of her arousal. The sting of doeskin on
her buttocks and thighs felt wonderful, warming her beautifully.
The thrumming vibration of the blows transmitted itself through
muscle and bone and made her sex quiver until it was contracting in
time with every stroke. Shoulders aching, Pam balanced on the balls
of her feet and revelled in the flood of heat that abruptly joined
the fiery stinging. She half-opened her eyes when the whipping
stopped but her disappointment was momentary as she saw Rafael pick
up the ox-hide flogger. Then the pain really began.

Pam drifted and then soared. She
was flying, and what she felt had long ceased to be pain or
pleasure but had melded into that incredible sensation so much
greater than both that it made all others pale into insignificance.
Joy and gratitude swelled in equal measure.
Nothing could compare to the feelings Rafael was capable of
stirring in her.
The man she loved. The man who loved her.
Her belly curled, and she came in long, rippling spasms.

Rafael left her
wrists in their leather cuffs when he laid her on the bed. Forcing
her arms above her head, he used her as a slave girl should be
used, pounding her wonderfully throbbing buttocks into the mattress
with hard lunges of his rigid cock, while his weight upon her
heightened the delicious ache and burn of her freshly flogged
breasts.
Wave after wave of delight washed over
Pam
until the hot surge of his come plunged her into
ecstasy once more. Afterwards
, she
glowed
inside and out as he held her, comfortable, safe and sated in his
arms – comfortable despite the
scald and
scorch
of the weals on buttocks and back, breasts and
thighs. She hovered between wakefulness and sleep, unwilling to
surrender her consciousness and relinquish the moment. She was too
happy, happier than she would ever have believed possible, lying in
the circle of her Master’s arms a world away from everything she
had once valued, and which she knew now had never been
important.

Pam must have fallen asleep, for
she woke at the touch of a hand smoothing her hair from her neck.
She looked up into Rafael’s face. Her heart pattered and she
shivered as he closed something around her neck and locked it in
place.
Pam reached to it in wonderment. It was not
the collar she had been expecting. It was a gold necklace, a chain
thick enough to make her aware of its weight, but jewellery, not a
symbol of slavery. Puzzled, she let her fingers explore the
unyielding metal. It felt warm against her skin.
Rafael held
a tiny key
on another, thinner
chain. He
slipped the chain over his head and let the key rest on the springy
hair curling on his chest. His forefinger slid gently across Pam’s
lower lip and then he bent to kiss her.

“Thank you,” Pam whispered in
the moment before their mouths met
, though she was
still unsure quite what she was thanking him for.

He took her again, and once more
pain and pleasure mingled and then coalesced into the greater
sensation that was at the same time neither and both. Rafael did
not hold her when he was finished.

“Clean up,” he said, Master now,
not lover, “and put your hair up. You’ll find something to do it
with in the bathroom.
It will be dinner time
soon.”

* * * * *

Rafael sensed a movement from
the corner of his eye and looked through the half-open door of his
bathroom. Pam did not look in his direction as she padded barefoot
and silent across the carpet to stand beneath the shiny steel hook
from which he had so recently suspended her. He saw her head tilt
back as she looked up at it and her hand reach upwards, then stop
just short of touching it. She turned aside and paused to stare at
the chromed-metal whipping post before going to the ox-hide flogger
that hung in its place on the wall rack. Again she reached out and
again drew back without letting her fingers touch the implement
that had given her pain. Rafael smiled to himself. It had given her
pleasure too
- a pleasure that had been at least
the equal of his own. He need never have any doubts about that in
the future. He had had plenty of others after the exhilaration of
having Pam fling herself into his arms aboard the
Empire’s Triumph
had worn
off. They had only increased as she had answered his questions
about where she came from.

The more Pam
told him about the other Earth that had been her home, the more
unbelievable the place seemed, with machines that flew without
needing helium and engines that did not need steam. Most important
to Rafael, there was no slavery. The customs and rules sounded
craziest of all, especially the ones Pam said men had passed to
make females their equals in the eyes of the law. She had even
somehow been involved in their enforcement, though he was pretty
confused about that part, particularly when her recent confession
had confirmed his strong suspicion that she had had experience of
mixing pain with pleasure before she had ever appeared on the
airship. It was not hard to credit as he watched her reach back to
the welts on her beautifully curved buttocks and smooth
a
palm over the ridges he had raised on her soft skin. Her flesh
yielded under the pressure of her hand. He watched her shiver and
lift her head, and then her fingers splay and sink deeper.
At the same time she reached up her other hand to
caress the chain he had placed around her neck. This girl, it
seemed, could both submit and enjoy pain without having any desire
to endure slavery.

He had been
unfair to her. Not for the first time since buying Pam, Rafael felt
a pang of guilt. More than his doubts about what she really wanted
had made him hesitate. He had had the feeling he was out of his
depth from the moment he had handed over his money, and the first
question that had entered his mind as he had received her ownership
papers had been, was this what
he
really wanted? He had wrestled with it many times
since, while delaying facing up to the inevitable consequences of
his actions. Now he could no longer put it off. She both needed and
deserved to know. And he was ready to tell her.

Rafael stepped into the bedroom.
Pam looked in his direction and a pink flush rose prettily on her
cheeks as she
met his eye. He
looked at the
crimson blush on her skin and deepening red of the marks he had
imprinted on her beautiful breasts and thighs. She had made-up her
face and pinned her hair in place with the gold comb set with
pearls he had left in the bathroom. She was beautiful and she was
his. His heart surged at the pleasure and excitement the thought
gave him, as he
felt again
the one emotion
he had never dreamed he would feel for any girl – the same emotion
he saw in the shining eyes staring adoringly into his. He loved
her. Nothing had ever felt so good.

“You look beautiful,” Rafael
said, and the pleasure that lit up Pam’s face as he smiled at her
and she at him made his heart skip again.
“I have
to tell you something. I hope it....”

“M… Master,” Persephone, who was
not really Persephone at all, dropped to her knees in the
doorway.

“No need to kneel when you have
a message,” Rafael said, rolling his eyes at Pam. “What is it?”

The girl jumped to her feet and
bowed. “D... Daisy sent me, Master. The… the other Master is
waiting downstairs.”

“Okay, we’ll be there soon.” He
watched her run from his presence. “Are you sure she’s getting more
confident?”

“Definitely, but it’s going to
take time. I don’t think she had ever said a word to her Master in
the place she came from.”

“I still see the Persephone
we both thought we knew
when I look at
her,” Rafael said, opening his wardrobe. “I wonder sometimes where
she went and what happened to her.” He
shrugged.
“But not often.
I’m more
interested in what happened to the real Persephone, the one who
must have ended up in that little monster’s world over four years
ago.”

“I guess we’ll
never know that,”
Pam replied. “I wonder why it took her and
not me.”

“I’m just glad that’s how it
happened, sweetheart.”

“I have an idea about it. It’s
only a theory, or more of a feeling really.”

He gave her a questioning
look.