Protege (29 page)

“Are you excited for tonight?”

Collette dried the silverware as Sadie washed the last dish. “I'm not really sure what's on the schedule. Jude likes to surprise me.”

She smiled. “Then I won't spoil it for you.”

After the kitchen and dining room were clean, Collette followed Sadie through the house. “Where did they go?”

Sadie grinned. “They're waiting in the Great Room.”

Outside the room, Sadie paused and opened a small closet. Collette nervously looked around when the other woman suddenly started removing her clothes. She folded them into a perfect square and retrieved a long leather strap, holding it reverently on her opened palms.

“You should probably go to your man, now,” Sadie said.

Collette was eager to get back to Jude and nodded. Just as she was walking into the Great Room—
great
didn't seem an adequate term for such grand windows and thick trim—her phone buzzed. She glanced at the screen.

Come to me.

Her heart raced with desire to do just that, a gentle pull at her loins to find him. She loved when he sent texts like that, clear and direct, so easy to achieve.

His eyes found hers and pulled her in, tracking her every move and making it difficult to look away and note the furniture around the room. When she reached him she folded to her knees.

His hand, so gentle and reassuring, grazed her jaw. “Beautiful peach. Tonight I think I'd like to hold you. Slide your panties out from under your dress and give them to me.”

Anticipation filled her chest as she rose. Glancing around—
what the fuck?

Her eyes went wide as she stared at the wall of weapons and froze.

“Collette?”

It took manually forcing her muscles to move for her to turn back to Jude.

“Is everything okay?”

She swallowed thickly.
Don't you see it?
Her tongue was filling her mouth, heavy and awkward, and her lips were numb. When she finally forced the words out, they came in a wheeze. “What are we doing here?”

He gave her a level stare, the sort that expressed his need for her to trust him. “Watching. Only watching.”

Watching what? Who? Why?
She didn't want to watch. All of those heavily braided tools and metal things—she knew they were supposed to be sexual—but to her they weren't. She used to hate flipping through the channels and accidentally stumbling across a medical procedure. She'd rather watch open-heart surgery at the moment than see a live showing of those tools in action.

Disappointment filled her, not disappointment in herself, but in the possibility that Jude might be trying to tell her something. Did he want her to participate in something with things like that? The sudden urge to cry, not weep, but actually cry like a petulant child came over her out of nowhere.

Her head shook. “No.”

His brow slowly arched as if warning her to rephrase her word choice. She wasn't telling him
no
, she was begging the forces of nature and whatever god listened to make this go away, to not let this happen. She liked how gentle he was. She didn't want him to have a taste for darker tendencies, desires she couldn't satisfy.

“Remove your panties and sit down, Collette. Damien's eager to begin.”

Trembling, she reached under her flared skirt and slid her panties down her thighs. Folding them twice, she handed them to him, and he placed them in his pocket.

As she fit herself on his lap, her back to his chest and shoulder, his arms came around her front and her nerves slightly settled. But there was no tempering the worry in the front of her mind that he was trying to achieve something by being here.

His breath whispered over her ear as his voice pitched soft and low. “While you observe them, I'll be observing you. That's all this is, peach.”

His hand slid under her skirt as his knees hooked between hers and dragged them apart. His fingers dragged softly over her skin as he whispered in her ear again.

“Now, you will be very quiet as we have the privilege of watching Damien and Sadie. We're not here to judge, only to learn. Damien's an experienced sadist and Sadie has been his masochistic sub for almost a decade. Watching them scene, the way they communicate flawlessly with their eyes, it's like watching two lovers reconnect after a lifetime at war and finding reason to hope again.”

Sadie walked out to the open area before the wall of torture devices and lowered herself to the floor. Her palms never dropped below her shoulders as she held her arms extended with the long strap folded in two.

Her body folded into a child's pose and those palms remained extended. It had to hurt. The muscles in her narrow back showed with knots of tension as she waited. There was no music, no talking, just them on a chair in the corner, watching, as Sadie bowed.

Jude's fingers continued to drift up her leg as they waited. His hand followed the crease of her thigh and hip until it rested over her sex. He left it there, just holding her, and she didn't know why. It felt nice, his hand possessively cupping her delicate folds. But her mind was too worried about what would happen in this room to focus on much more beyond Sadie's willowy form.

The door opened and closed and Collette's breath hitched as Damien stepped into the room. Jude had warned her not to judge, but it was difficult. She was quickly settling on not liking Damien, despite his hospitality and pleasant manners at dinner.

He walked to the stage—it wasn't actually a stage, but it might as well have been. It was impossible to look anywhere else, much like it was impossible to ignore the presence of a man like Damien.

Jude wasn't like that. He was quiet and gentle, yet demanding and threatening in a subtle way, perhaps
more
threatening than Damien because it took a lot to get him heated.

Damien stood in front of Sadie and said something Collette couldn't make out. The woman slowly rose and presented the long strap. Damien took the strap, gave it a testing tug, and then let it unravel. Collette's eyes stopped blinking. Not a strap, a leash.

Holding the fastening of the leash, he walked behind his wife and grabbed a handful of her hair, jerking her head back. Collette gasped and Jude gave a warning squeeze to her hip. “Try to stay quiet, peach,” he murmured.

Damien attached the leash to Sadie's collar and gave it a sharp tug, dragging her to her hands and knees. He walked along the wall, Sadie trailing behind in a crawl, as he perused the items on the wall.

Collette's dislike for the man grew, as she felt humiliated for his poor wife.
No judging.
She tried to not to form opinions, but it was impossible. She didn't like the sight of a woman—the man's wife—being led around like a dog.

Her brow furrowed as he selected various items from the wall, showing them to Sadie and sometimes brushing them across her cheek in a way that gave Collette the chills. He laid them out with care on a long wooden slab of a table that looked like it belonged in the basement of a sixteenth-century castle.

Her stomach twisted as the moment built. She was certain he would use one of those tools soon. It was outside her comprehension how someone could derive pleasure from being whipped. Good for them if they could, but whenever she was struck, it hurt. However, she'd never been whipped and . . . She was really judging them harshly.

Forcing out a cleansing breath, she shook off her reservations and tried to watch with an open mind.

“Peach, you need to open your eyes to see.”

Damn it.

Okay, she was
watching
—eyes open this time—without reservations or judgment. Sadie obviously was here of her own free will, and Jude had made it perfectly clear that no one entered Fernweh without a safe word.

The leash was tugged and Sadie rose to her feet, her grace a testament to years of practice. Damien turned her to the wall and clamped her limbs in place, leaving her plastered there like a starfish.

He returned to the table and slowly cuffed the sleeves of his dress shirt. When he returned to his wife, a sort of whip—Collette didn't know the names—dangled at his side.

“That's a flogger,” Jude whispered. “He'll use it to sensitize her first. He knows exactly where to strike and the right amount of pressure to achieve the desired effect.”

Which was . . . ?

Damien whispered something in his wife's ear and she hummed and mumbled something back. Then it began. The whooshing flicks of the flogger filled the silence as Sadie's gentle moans told of the pleasure she was receiving.

Collette frowned. He was brushing the tassels against his wife's flesh as much as he was flicking them. A soft pattern slowly rose over Sadie's skin, but he didn't appear to be striking her hard at all. Maybe she
could
try something like this if that was what Jude wanted. But no leash. She couldn't do the leash. Different strokes for different folks.

When Sadie's back, thighs, and shoulders were a rosy feathering of pink, he returned to the table. Jude's fingers probed at Collette's sex, catching her off guard. He didn't go deep, probably because she was in such deep concentration she was bone dry.

Damien removed the bindings and shoved his wife to her knees, her back now against the wall. He quickly wrapped her wrists with rope and pulled them high overhead.

Jude's finger slid deeper. “You like seeing her tied up?”

Perhaps she did. There was something about being restrained, something about the rope that excited her in a way the cuffs against the wall did not.

His thumb stroked her clit as they watched. Damien pulled a hook down and tied the other end of the rope so Sadie's arms would stay suspended.

Her breasts appeared flat as the muscles of her arms pulled, and then Damien withdrew his erection from his pants. Collette intended to look away, but a second later the flash of hard flesh disappeared in his wife's mouth.

His palms flattened on the walls as his hips thrust fast—too fast. How was Sadie breathing? All Collette could hear were the slurping, gagging sounds of the woman choking on his cock. It was too much and she couldn't find the evidence of the love she'd glimpsed earlier.

Turning her face into Jude's chest she looked away. “He's so rough with her,” she whispered.

His fingers brushed over her folds, her arousal a forgotten memory. “She enjoys it that way. He does it
for
her, not to harm her. It's how she finds release.”

Worried what she'd do if he ever fucked her mouth that hard while her head was against a wall with nowhere to go, she whispered, “I could never do that.”

“You could, if it were something you wanted, but I draw no pleasure from such coarse play, so you don't have to worry.”

Then what were they doing there? She didn't think long on their purpose, because she was more interested in Jude's promise that she had nothing to worry about. How could he make such a promise when their time was running out and she could possibly be going to someone else? It wasn't something they'd discussed since his decision to let her stay on as his protégé, but the more time that passed the more she worried her happy balance was about to be shattered.

She didn't like thinking about how little time they had left. It seemed impossible that three weeks had already passed—impossible that he could let her walk away at this point. She didn't want to go, and thinking of such a thing made her pull him closer.

Damien stepped back and Collette's mouth gaped. Sadie's face was glistening with his come and red with blotches where he'd held her too tight. Yet her eyes . . . there was something strange about her eyes.

The look in her eyes spoke of enchantment, half-lidded fascination, the sort of look woman gives a man after a life-altering orgasm. Sadie really did like it, just as Jude had implied.

Damien unraveled the rope from the hook but didn't untie her wrists. Dragging a wooden chair from the wall, he pulled her by the rope and had her straddle the seat, kneeling with her thighs parted, chest against the back rungs, and her arms looping around the wooden slats. Collette squinted as she saw the glistening arousal on her thighs.

“He's going to spank her now until she comes,” Jude whispered.

Collette's frown deepened. How could someone come from spanking alone, isolated and without sexual contact? BDSM truly confused her. While she adored the aspects of D/s and mild elements of the BD, the SM really didn't stimulate her on a sexual level at all.

She was actually curious and a touch jealous, wishing she could feel what women like Sadie experienced. It seemed so intense and drugging, like nothing Collette had ever known.

Damien removed his belt, and for once she made out his words. “This will teach you . . .” Her attention clung to his promise, suddenly obsessed with what might have transpired earlier between the two. Her mind unraveled multiple possibilities with no clue which was closest to the truth.

The sharp clap of leather to flesh echoed, as if far away, and suddenly children were laughing and her mind was in a different place.

“Come on, Collette, it's just over here.”

She chased Jason through the brambles as the tart scent of cherries thickened in the warm summer air. He climbed over the fence and a young Collette bit her lip, knowing they weren't allowed this far from the house. But as Jason disappeared between rows of red blooming cherry trees, she feared she'd lose him.

Her foot pressed into the rail and she hoisted her weight over the fence. As she ran, her ribbon came loose and her curls broke free. Her neck moistened with sweat under the hot sun and the weight of her hair as she chased after Jason.

He jumped out and caught her arm, spinning her to a halt as they crashed on the ground. He grinned, holding his body over hers. “Let me see them.”

She shoved him and laughed. “Jason, get off me.”