# Game

Justine Elyot

The stakes are high, the game is on. In this sequel to Justine Elyot’s bestselling ‘On Demand’, Sophie discovers a whole new world of daring sexual exploits.A dark, sensual romance for anyone lusting after more than ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’.Sophie’s sexual tastes have always been a bit on the wild side – something her boyfriend Lloyd has always loved about her.But Sophie gives Lloyd every part of her body except her heart. To win all of her, Lloyd challenges Sophie to live out her secret fantasies.As the game intensifies, she experiments with all kinds of kinks and fetishes in a bid to understand what she really wants.But Lloyd feature in her final decision?Or will the ultimate risk he takes drive her away from him?From the author of the bestselling Mischief titles ‘Kinky’ and ‘His House of Submission’.

## Game. Justine Elyot

Table of Contents

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

More from Mischief

About Mischief

Copyright

About the Publisher

## Chapter One

In the forest, it’s reached that point of perfect darkness. The tree branches no longer provide a visible tracery against the gathering gloom, just a sighing canopy above my head and I have to reach out to avoid stepping into a bramble bush or hitting a trunk. Much as I want to stop moving, to crawl into my bivouac and wrap myself in my blankets, I know I can’t. The steady dry crunch of distant leaves tells me I am being followed.

I hear it now and then, sometimes coming from my left, sometimes my right, or my rear or ahead, never in the same place twice. I know I can’t elude the stalker because my own feet, tiptoed as they are, inevitably disturb the brushwood forest floor. Tiny snaps and crackles accompany every hesitant step. North, south, east or west? It doesn’t matter. He, she or it will be on my tail.

I crouch against a tree and everything goes quiet. I concentrate on training my eyes and ears to pick up every single piece of information that they can, but all they process is that mournful branch chorus and a faraway neighing from one of the many wild ponies in the forest. That, and a load of looming dark shapes that don’t help me one little bit.

Once I can no longer hold my breath, I creep forwards, my sense of direction pulling me in a north-easterly direction, further into the depths. There is a sudden, sharp crack of twigs and a heat, a human male smell that cuts through the piny forest scent, and I am lost. Taken.

Of course, I put up a fight, but he is much taller and stronger than I am, spare-framed but steely. My stupid dress doesn’t help either. If only I’d had time to organise my escape from the palace I’d have sourced buckskins and stout boots, but circumstances were sprung on me and I had to flee in what I stood in. Stained, torn satin slippers don’t pack much of a kick.

Although there is nobody to hear us, his hand clamps straight away over my mouth.

‘Easy,’ he says, and his voice is incongruously soft and gentle. ‘You know you can’t fight me. Hold still and I won’t hurt you.’

He is right. I might as well preserve my energy.

I let him pin my wrists together behind my back and nudge me, hand still covering my lower face, forwards to some unspecified location.

When I hear the sound of a zip, I have to bite my cheeks to squash down the smile. Of course, it would have been too much to expect him to construct an authentic woodsman’s hut out of branches and tree roots and whatnot just for the sake of one night’s entertainment, but a tent will have to substitute. At least it’ll be much more comfortable. Less risk of creepy-crawlies in the nooks and crannies.

With his hands on my shoulders, he pushes me down to my knees on the pile of sleeping bags and attends to tying my wrists together above my head.

‘That’s a good girl, Princess, nice and quietly,’ he says, approving of my compliance. ‘Now lie down and I’ll get you something to drink. You must be thirsty and hungry – you didn’t stop to grab any provisions, by all accounts.’

I let him manoeuvre me into a supine position, arms arched over my head. He brings a hip flask to my lips and water trickles around my mouth and, occasionally, into it. Yes, I hadn’t realised it, but I am thirsty, my throat parched by panic and exertion. I probably couldn’t have screamed much even if I’d been allowed to.

The air mattress shifts as he lengthens out beside me, propped on one elbow. I can make out the shape of a face looking down at me in the dark. Suddenly there is light and I squint and turn away from it for a moment, but he steers the back of my head round to face him.

There he is, my captor, pale and intent, full lips curling in pleasurable triumph.

How dare he smile at me?

‘When my father hears about this,’ I tell him, ‘he’ll have your head on a pike.’

He puts a long finger on my lips and shakes his head, tutting, still smirking.

‘Princess, your father is paying me for this.’

I try to toss my head, but his finger remains at its station, sealing my mouth.

‘He won’t suffer the dishonour of having to tell the Dark Prince that the deal is off. Do you really think your father would just sit back and let you ruin his historic accord? He is going to have you delivered to the Dark Prince whether you like it or not – but first, I’m taking you back to the palace.’

‘You’re a bounty hunter?’ I manage to drive the words past his gate-keeping digit.

‘I prefer “personnel retrieval operative” myself,’ he says.

‘How about “mercenary scumbag”?’ I try to bite his finger but, quick as a whip, he silences me with an alternative method, one that involves the hard pressure of lips against lips.

This low-down piece of peasant flotsam thinks he can kiss a princess of the blood royal! It is not to be borne.

But my struggles lead only to capitulation and heaving of the bosom, because this low-down piece of peasant flotsam kisses like no man I have ever known. His lips are skilled, his tongue firm in its probing. Against my will, against every noble instinct I possess, I yield to the pleasure it brings.

Or rather, I forget my role and slide, so easily, so sweetly, into my lover’s kiss, pushing my tongue against his, tasting and scouring him, greedier than ever for him.

But this isn’t the game. The game is about resistance, about dubious consent that turns, eventually, to desire.

So I try to shake him off, working against the craving in the pit of my stomach, the blossoming in my crotch.

‘You’re passionate,’ he says. ‘Feisty, yes, but what a little firecracker you’d be in my bed. I’d like to take you, but the Dark Prince …’

‘Fuck the Dark Prince and fuck you, peasant. How dare you kiss me!’

His hand smacks down on my hip and he yanks me around on to my side. ‘It seemed the best way to shut you up,’ he hisses into my ear. ‘Besides –’ he pulls back, makes sure he has my full attention ‘– I have licence to do more than that.’

A warning flare shoots from solar plexus to groin.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Lie back down, Princess. I’m going to clean you up. And don’t argue – I’ll gag you if you swear at me again. Consider your rank and station, for heaven’s sake.’

I nearly laugh out loud at his tone of schoolmasterly disappointment. He’s got so good at this lately, not that he was ever bad.

‘That’s exactly what I am doing,’ I grumble, watching him retrieve a bottle of soapy water from a backpack and pour it into a mess tin. ‘That’s why I object to your … familiarity.’

‘The familiarity’s only going to get more … familiar,’ he warns me. He’s looking in the backpack again. This time he draws out an odd thing, a small round sponge attached to the end of a wooden handle. ‘I’m instructed to clean you up.’

‘What?’ I try to lift my spine, but the best I can manage is a tilt of the neck.

He dips the sponge in the soapy water. I hope to goodness it’s warm.

‘Don’t say you don’t need it,’ he says teasingly. ‘You’re tattered and torn to pieces and covered in bits of leaf and thorn. Here.’

My dress is low-cut and he begins by dabbing the sponge over my collarbone then along the square-necked edges of my décolletage. The water is not completely cold, but I shiver all the same as the suds slide along my skin, sinking in while the tiny bubbles burst.

‘Forgive me, Princess,’ he says gruffly, and then he unlaces my bodice so that the sponge can glide underneath the material, wetting my breasts, circling my nipples until they are hard, soaked little bullets dimpling the damp cloth.

‘Surely I’m not dirty there,’ I protest, but it’s a gasp, almost a yelp, and I can see my chest rise and fall in front of me, faster and faster with each breath.

His voice is almost a whisper. ‘Oh yes you are.’ He sucks air through gritted teeth. A steam cloud of lust takes its form in the space between us.

He removes the sponge from my bodice and runs a palm over the peaked mounds, his face down low, his breath warming the goose-pimpled flesh.

‘Mmm,’ he says. ‘Now spread your legs for me, Princess. I’m going to lift your skirts.’

‘Oh,’ I whimper, the resistance draining fast. ‘Why? Why must you …?’ But I spread them and raise my knees as well.

‘Because the Dark Prince wants you clean there, runaway Princess. Among other things.’

He pushes up the layers of skirts until they lie heavy on my stomach. Underneath, no knickers. Apparently they were a Victorian innovation. I’m not sure what time period we’re in, but it’s a draughty one.

I watch with thrilled dread as my captor loads his sponge with soapy water once more then carries it, dripping on to my breasts and stomach, down to my split thighs, drenching them so that rivers of liquid run down to my open sex.

Not that it needs to be any wetter.

‘Oh fuck,’ I say, having lost control of my voluntary reactions at the first brush of sponge on clit.

‘Nice and clean,’ he croons, sweeping it between my pussy lips and over my pulsing vagina, letting soapy suds impart their mild sting to the crack of my arse. He increases the pressure when the sponge returns to my clitoris, pushing it against the swollen bead, rotating it very slowly until I arch my back and voice an inarticulate plea.

Before I can come, he removes it. I feel its loss, my entire lower body seeming to collapse in on itself in an effort to suck it back.

The tips of his fingers flutter and waft around my cunt.

Use them.

‘The King suspects,’ he whispers, never quite letting them close enough to touch while I moan and strain towards them, ‘you may have conspired with a lover. He has asked me to gain proof of your virginity.’

‘Oh God.’ My hips tremble.

‘Lie very still, Princess. Don’t move a muscle.’

One finger sheaths itself and my cunt seems to sigh with relief.

‘Mmm,’ he says, adding another, then another, until I am stretched and feeling the invasion. His thumb lands on my clit, lightly, tenderly, but enough to bring every nerve ending to rapt attention.

‘Hmm, still intact,’ he lies. ‘I’ve done the King’s bidding. Shall we prepare for the journey back to the palace?’

‘Oh.’ I want to cry with the pitch of my need. He is holding me on that edge, skimming it so expertly, keeping me in piteous thrall. ‘No. Please.’

‘No? Wilful spoilt princess is lying on her back with her legs spread and a peasant’s fingers up inside her and she doesn’t want him to stop? Is that right?’

‘Yes. Yes.’

‘She wants him to make her come?’

‘God, yes.’

‘Then she’d better tell him so, because humble serfs need royal permission to finger the royal cunt, don’t they? Not to mention fiddling with the royal clit.’

‘Jesus, Lloyd …’

‘Nuh uh.’ His fingers slide halfway out and I clamp my thighs, trying to catch them. He smacks the accessible part of my bum and tuts at me. ‘None of that, missy. We’re finishing this in character. Come on. Do as you’re told.’

‘Please, peasant, make me come. Please, please, now, please.’

He presses down; the fingers reinsert themselves.

I come, thrashing and snarling, twisting into his hand.

‘How about that?’ He sounds so smug I’d slap him if I weren’t both bound and sapped by the force of my orgasm. ‘Princesses come just the same as wenches. You’re just a wench underneath it all, aren’t you?’

‘Insolent,’ I pant, but I can’t finish the thought. I don’t have it in me.

‘That’s me.’ He stretches himself out at my side, watching me so hard that I have to turn my face away. ‘Oh, are you shy now? Now you’ve begged me to finger you. Bit late for that.’ He chuckles. ‘What a pisser about the Dark Prince and his insistence on you being virgo intacta. I’d love to show you how a man can make you feel.’ His fingers are gentle on my waist, running up and down its slopes until I can’t turn my back on him any more.

My eyes meet his.

‘What would the Dark Prince do if I were no longer a virgin?’

My captor doesn’t understand me at first, frowning in vague bemusement.

‘I mean,’ I expand, ‘would he still want me for his bride?’

‘He would shame you before the populace and send you home.’

‘Send me home. And the marriage would be dissolved?’

‘Most certainly it would. And your father would vow to kill the man who had touched you first. So if you’re thinking …’

‘I would lie. Tell some story of a band of brigands in the forest.’

‘Who would be sought. Then some innocent man would be arrested and killed. Your father wouldn’t rest until he had somebody to hold accountable.’

‘You’re right.’ I sigh, bite my lip. ‘I shall say I forced the man to do it.’

He laughs. ‘Who would believe that?’

‘My father knows me. He knows I’ll do anything to avoid this match. He would believe it. I would simply refuse to name my deflowerer.’

He strokes my forehead with a thumb. ‘You put yourself in terrible danger, Princess, if you do this. The Dark Prince isn’t a man many would cross.’

‘I’d rather risk it than face the certainty of having to spend the rest of my life with that brute.’ I drop my voice to a whisper. ‘Do it for me. Take my maidenhead for me.’

‘Gods, Princess, I … it’s not …’ He struggles.

I watch the weighing-up process through his shrewd blue eyes. I see it all – doubts, temptations, fears, rationalisations, temptations again, settling finally into outright lust.

I seize my moment. ‘Take me.’ I let my spine arch and my leg rub against his. ‘Let my first time be with a man who knows how to pleasure.’

‘Princess …’

‘Let your cock sink into my tight sweet embrace and …’ The florid language isn’t coming so easily now. I want him too much. My imagination is failing, hamstrung by my need to be shagged, good and proper, with my wrists tied and my pretend hymen breached. ‘Look, just fuck me, all right? Just give me what I need.’

With a growl, he almost tears off his shirt then rolls himself over me, palms flat by my ears, his milky freckled chest hovering over my straining breasts. He dips his head and takes the bodice between his teeth, wrenching it down over the small portion of my chest that remains concealed. He buries his face between my breasts, consuming and devouring, suckling the nipples and biting the soft flesh.

‘I’ll give you what you need all right. Get ready.’

He rears up on his knees, yanking his belt through its loops, snarling down at me. My body sings with triumph at the light in his eyes, the hard gleam that shows he has gone past the point of caring about anything but sex. I have him.

He frees his cock then takes my buttocks in his hands and yanks my thighs wide, lifting me towards him.

My tethered hands want to grab the back of his head and pull him down on top of me, but they can’t. I know what’s coming, but I want to have it quicker, harder, more urgently than is even possible. I manage to hook my knees around his hips, drawing the tip of that fat feast of a cock into me.

‘You know this might hurt, yes?’

‘I don’t care. I hope it does. I want to feel it. I want something to remember you by.’

‘Here it comes then.’

He crouches over me and pushes in, slowly at first, oh, too slowly. I try to remember that I am meant to be virginal, but I am so eager I just can’t wait.

‘Do it,’ I gasp.

‘Hot little bitch, what do they teach you at the palace? Oh God.’ He pushes through and I rejoice in the blunt force of it. ‘Oh fuck. They teach you how to use your cunt, I think. Jesus, you’re tight, so wet.’

‘Oh, you feel good; you’re so big. You fill me right up. This is what the peasant girls get. Why can’t I get it too?’

‘You’re getting it now.’ He thrusts, deeply and steadily, in and out, dropping lascivious kisses that leave teeth marks on my neck. ‘Oh yes, you’re getting it. You’re feeling that, aren’t you?’

‘Oh.’ I can’t say much more. ‘Yes.’ The air mattress rolls and waves madly underneath me. I hammer my heels on the tight cheeks of his arse.

‘Remember this, Princess.’ He seats a brutal thrust, buried so deep inside me that I feel impaled. ‘It’ll be the fuck of your life. Your princes and courtiers won’t know what a princess really needs.’

I have time for one luxurious moan before he speeds up, jackhammering like a red-headed blur, pounding me to my second orgasm.

His face in the torchlight contorts in a sort of pain. I feel the tension, then the ecstatic release beneath his skin as he pours himself into me, roaring.

His stalwart strength drains from him and he flops on top of me, groaning and shivering. I kiss the top of his head and think how lucky I am not to be that princess really. For one thing, what if she got pregnant? Imagine the king’s face. Whatever kind of face he had.

No, I much prefer being a twenty-first century woman with a lover whose filthy-mindedness matches my own. I never thought I’d take to relationships, but this one actually seems to have some mileage in it.

Lloyd stirs and rustles among the sleeping bags, then unties my wrists. ‘Did that work for you?’ he asks with a yawn.

‘You know it did.’

‘I know how you love a forced seduction.’

‘And you don’t?’

He chuckles guiltily. ‘Bang to rights.’

‘In fact, I’m considering a sequel. I want to know what happens when she turns up at the Dark Prince’s lair now. I’m imagining lots of pointy towers and turrets on the side of a crag. She’d turn up and the Dark Prince would subject her to a virginity test.’

‘Surely he’d just go ballistic and run her through with his mighty sword?’

‘Well, yeah, running through with your mighty sword is always good, but my Dark Prince isn’t as dark as all that. He’s miffed, of course, but he’s still interested in the dowry the Princess brings, so he decides to go through with the wedding.’

‘Really? You think he would?’

‘He wants that alliance. But the wedding night would be pretty fierce. Quite a BDSM scene, I think. Some punishment, maybe a bit of bondage. And anal sex. He wants to take a virginity, even if it isn’t the traditional kind.’

Lloyd exhales heavily. ‘Don’t turn me on again, Sophie. I seriously think you’ve broken my cock, what with all that shagging al fresco on the forest floor earlier.’

‘Aww.’ I reach down and fondle the poor little semi-tumescent soldier. ‘I won’t make you fuck me again,’ I promise. ‘Not tonight. But that scene has to be played sometime soon.’

‘Oh yes. I’m not arguing about that.’

He removes my hand from his cock and puts an arm around me, drawing me against him so that we make one big bundle of satiated sleepiness.

‘Soph,’ he says, just before I nod off.

‘Hmm?’

‘Do you think we’ll ever get into a rut?’

I am amused. ‘Our relationship is one long rut, isn’t it?’

‘You know what I mean, Oscar Wilde. Do you think you’ll ever get bored with this?’

‘What, with a metric tonne of quality sex? I don’t think so.’

‘It’s just … I can’t help wondering why you carry on paying rent on that flat when my suite at the hotel is big enough for –’

Ah. This again.

‘Lloyd. I said I’d think about it. I’m still thinking.’

‘Your thought processes are seriously slow. You said that six months ago. You can’t fob me off forever.’

‘I won’t.’

‘I know you, Sophie Martin.’ He turns, props himself on an elbow and puts a finger to my protesting lips. ‘You will.’

He’s right. But I don’t understand the big deal. We see each other all the time – we work together, for heaven’s sake. We couldn’t be any closer. Why do we need old-fashioned symbols of commitment to prove it? I’m a person who lives for the day, and the day is sunny right now. It makes no sense to change that.

I can’t be bothered to argue though, so I mentally prepare myself for the nth recitation of Why Sophie Should Move In With Lloyd.

It doesn’t happen. What he says instead is exponentially more interesting.

‘You won’t ever make the decision, Soph, so I’m going to help you.’

I try to say ‘How?’ but his finger prevents the framing of the word.

‘I’m going to make it a game. If you lose, you move in with me. If you win, you don’t.’

He removes the finger.

‘I don’t understand. What sort of game? Cluedo? Chess?’

‘It doesn’t have a name. It’s a sex game, our favourite kind.’

‘Oh, good.’

‘The stakes are potentially high – for me at least. I’m going to set you a series of challenges. You don’t have to take them, but if you turn them down you incur a fail. You might find a scene or a person that attracts you more than I do – that’s the risk I’m taking. But if you don’t, and if you incur three fails, or decide to quit, you move in with me.’

‘Hang on. So – you’re going to send me off to have sex with various strangers or groups of strangers?’

‘Yeah, basically.’

‘And if I take them all on, I keep my flat?’

‘That’s right.’

‘But if I chicken out or get fed up with all the shagging, I have to move in with you?’

‘Are you up for it? Do you dare?’

Lloyd knows my weakness for a dare, the bastard. But it takes the pressure off me. All the tedious weighing up and sifting of pluses and minuses. Not to mention the fear. The fear is what really holds me back.

‘Would you be involved in these challenges?’

‘Sometimes, perhaps. Sometimes I’d just want your post-match report. You know I like hearing about your adventures. It turns me on.’

I smile, thinking back to the days when I used to sit at his cocktail bar and tell him all about the threesome I’d just enjoyed, or whatever I’d been doing. I did it to wind him up, but obviously it had had a bigger effect than that.

‘You’re sure you’d be OK with it? You wouldn’t be jealous?’

‘When have I ever been jealous?’

‘Good point.’ Then some other words tumble out, slipping past my careful emotion-filter like undisciplined fish. ‘I wouldn’t ever want to hurt you.’

He strokes my brow, smiling sadly. ‘That’s nice to know. That’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me. In fact, it might be the only sweet thing you’ve ever said to me.’

‘Fuck off. I’m not that bad.’

‘You are, my darling. You are very, very bad. That’s why I like you.’

‘OK. So, these challenges?’

‘I shall deliver one a week in a sealed envelope to your pigeonhole at the hotel. You will send me a reply, telling me whether it’s a go or not. Then, on your day off, you make it happen. I’ll design the challenges so that some kind of proof of your success gets back to me, if I’m not there to watch or take part. It could be anything from, say, performing in a strip club –’

‘Been there, done that.’

‘I see I shall have to use my imagination. Hmm. Anyway, it could involve fetishes, groups, unusual situations. Or it could be something very simple. I’ll have to give it some thought. Actually, I might do a bit of research now. Exactly what haven’t you done, Soph?’

I puff my cheeks out. This is a tough question. ‘Most of the stuff I haven’t done is stuff I would never do.’

‘Right. But there are different ways of doing the things you have done. I’ll have to concentrate on those, I think. Multiple partners, S&M, sex in public, picking up strangers. All your favourites. Actually, fuck, you’ll pass this test with flying colours and then I’m shafted. Leave it with me. I’m going to come up with something fiendish.’

‘Oh, I’m sure you will. You’ve yet to disappoint on that score.’

‘Thank you. Another compliment – twice in one day!’

‘Don’t get used to it.’

‘As if I would. Now, about that Dark Prince …’

***

The very next evening, after work, the Princess presents herself to His Royal Highness the Prince of Petite Mort. She is belligerent and feisty, thrusting out her chest as she stands before him.

‘I demand an explanation,’ says the Prince, who is rather dashing in leather trousers and a sword belt, though the sword is only the plastic toy kind. The riding crop in his hand, however, is real. ‘Why did you run away to the forest?’

‘Because I didn’t want to marry a tyrant.’

‘Tyrant, eh? I’ll show you tyrant.’ He whacks the crop against his thigh, making a delicious whippy sound that melts the Princess’s resistance, not to mention her pussy. ‘Thought you could dishonour your pledge, did you? No such luck, my tempestuous beauty.’

Smirk break. He does overegg it a bit sometimes.

‘You won’t be smiling for much longer. I’m going to continue with the marriage.’

‘Oh, but –’

‘And you will bend to my will. And my whip.’

‘Yikes. But there’s something I must tell you. It might change your mind. I am no longer a virgin.’

‘Wha– but, you, what? No longer a virgin? How?’

‘The usual method, I think.’

He cracks the whip again, then grabs me by the forearm and pulls me close, capturing my chin in a firm grip.

‘Who? I’ll have his head on a pike.’

‘I don’t know his name. Some peasant of the forest.’

‘He violated you?’

‘No, I wanted it. I begged him to deflower me.’

‘A peasant!’ The Dark Prince’s roar could wake the slumberers of neighbouring lands. ‘You gave your maidenhead to a peasant? Willingly?’

‘Aye. Still want me for your bride?’

He yanks me over to the table and bends me over it, holding me down with a hand on my spine.

‘You’ll pay for your sluttish ways, my little whore princess. And yes, you will be my bride. I’m not giving up the chance to rule your father’s lands because you can’t keep your legs shut. Oh no. But you will learn not to repeat your loose behaviour, unless it’s in my bed.’

God, he’s good at this. My juices gush and I squeeze my trembling thighs together. My blood is up and rioting through my veins. Do it, I silently beg him, whip me.

The skirt comes up, petticoats and all, and I barely have time to screw my eyes shut before the first stroke whistles down, a bar of red heat lighting up my arse.

My lusty yell is only partly one of pain. I am wild with exhilaration. The rougher he plays, the crazier I get. I wonder what it would take to break me, and if he’ll ever reach that point. The idea excites me even more.

He wields the crop with an expert hand, laying a succession of hard, fast strokes until I want to jump up and hop about, but his other hand on my back holds me in place so that all I can do is take it. Stroke after stroke, burn after burn, while he rants and raves about what a whore I am and how I will submit to him and him alone.

I don’t know how many he gives me, but it must be near fifty at least when he lays the crop aside and runs a hand over my scorched and welted bottom.

‘What did that teach you, Princess?’ he pants, sounding quite exhausted.

‘It taught me who my master is,’ I sigh.

‘Yes. That was my intention. So, I have conquered you?’

‘Oh, you have. It’s so sore, ouch.’

His hand glides over the burning skin and then dips lower, to the wet ridges of my pussy, alighting on my needy clit.

‘You are in heat, Princess. The whipping has given you pleasure?’

‘No,’ I lie. ‘Only pain and humiliation.’

‘Then why are you so wet here? Are you truly a slut who wants cock all the time?’

‘No, no.’

‘You are.’ He shoves two fingers up inside me. ‘And this is where you took peasant cock. How was it? Was he a good size?’

‘He was long and thick and he used it well.’

He smacks my bum hard and I whimper and twist my hips.

‘I have decided that I will take your virginity, Princess.’

‘What? But …’

One wetted fingertip slips between my rear cheeks until it finds the tight pucker it seeks.

‘There is more than one kind of virginity.’

‘Oh God. Not there. Please, not there.’

‘You should have thought of that when you welcomed peasant cock into your hungry cunt, Princess. I’m not going where some serf has been. I shall have to use an alternative. It won’t get me many heirs, I suppose, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come. To it.’

Cold lubricant drips onto the tiny aperture. My hot arse welcomes it, but I am still nervous and focused, as I always am when Lloyd takes me this way. Somehow, it seems like a much bigger and bolder step than mere cock-in-cunt sex. There’s a momentous quality to it.

But he knows I can take it, and he knows exactly how rough he can be, and that’s exactly how rough he is, shoving his cock firmly into my bottom until he is wedged tight and I have squealed and squirmed through the difficult moment of full penetration.

‘There we are, Princess,’ he whispers. ‘Your arse is stuffed with a royal cock. How does it compare with what that peasant gave you?’

‘I feel owned, sir, and taken.’

‘That’s what you should feel. That’s what you are.’

He edges back and I cringe, then he thrusts himself to the hilt again.

‘Take it, my princess whore bride. Take my cock in your sore whipped arse and be grateful I wasn’t harder on you.’

So I take it, gratefully and meekly, offering my most private and intimate place to the man who has mastered me.

He uses it firmly while I finger my clit, loving the way my stomach bumps against the table with each forceful sheathing, glorying in the slap-slap of his pelvis against my burning bum cheeks.

A good buggering always results in the kind of orgasm that makes me wonder if I’m actually dying and this one is no different. I am torn into pieces, floating about in space, while he finishes with a grunt and a spurt of warmth deep inside me.

I reach blindly for his hand. He clasps mine and holds it tight while we recover, sighing and trembling over the table.

‘That learned ya, didn’t it?’ he says eventually, with a self-conscious chuckle.

‘It was incredible … just gets more incredible … every time.’ My wonderment is evident.

‘It does, doesn’t it? Makes you think.’

‘No, that’s what it doesn’t do. It makes me feel.’

‘You still want to go ahead with this challenge? Because we could just scrub it and you could move in tomorrow.’

For a split second I consider saying yes, OK, let’s do that. Why can’t I say yes? I thought saying no was the thing I couldn’t do.

## Chapter Two

He makes me wait two weeks for the first envelope.

Two weeks of cajolery and attempted entrapment into spilling the sex beans – but Lloyd is not to be drawn. Even when I stopped wanking him, right on the teetering tip of orgasm, and told him I wanted to milk him for information before I milked him for anything else. Even when he entered the office to find me posing on top of the desk in corset, suspenders and stockings, promising great things in exchange for a clue. Even when I locked myself into a chastity device and told him that the key would only appear on receipt of certain intelligence.

None of it worked.

He finished himself off. He swept me off the desk and sent me away to dress, with a smack to my arse. He … well, he didn’t have to do anything about the last one. I got bored of it after about ten minutes.

So now, two weeks after the deal was made, I am none the wiser about my first challenge.

I am completing some induction training for a group of new kitchen staff when my PA, Kathleen, trots up to me and tells me that ‘Mr Ellison says there’s an important note for you in your pigeonhole’.

I dismiss her, fling a bundle of leaflets and whatnot at the newbies and almost run out of Conference Room One towards the staffroom.

In the internet age, the pigeonholes are only used now for payslips and birthday cards, but they still cover one wall with boxy wooden monotony.

A couple of chambermaids are taking a tea break. They watch me march up to my mailbox and take out an A4 manila envelope. It’s quite thick. Nothing is written on the front.

I nod at the maids and subdue my urge to rip the thing open there and then, taking it instead into the privacy of the office.

The office, this quiet and sane oasis amid the hotel’s perma-bustle, always calms me. After a year, it’s lost all the associations I used to have with the former manager, Chase, and the stupid fixation I had with him. Now it belongs to me and Lloyd. Especially since the day we christened the desk …

Sitting at it, I visualise us on top of it, me riding Lloyd energetically while the stationery tipped over and fell on the carpet. It makes me smile.

I am still smiling when I pick up the paperknife and make an elegant slit in the envelope. I tip it upside down on the desktop, watching its contents slide out.

One sheet of Luxe Noir writing paper, one vellum business card.

Dear Sophie

Don’t ever tell me I’m not good to you. I’ve designed this first challenge around two of your favourite pursuits. One, of course, is sex. The other is photography. I don’t know what’s in your dark room these days, but one day I hope you’ll do your fixing and developing in our shared place of residence.

A task with you behind the camera would be too easy, though. Where would be the challenge in that? No, what I’m asking you to do is swap places and become the model.

The lady whose business card you will find in here is a highly regarded photographer who specialises in human sexuality. Her ‘thing’ is to capture the face at the moment of orgasm. Nice, eh? I’ve booked you in for a session.

Call the number on the card when you get this letter and she’ll give you your appointment time, and directions to the studio.

I think you’ll agree that this is a gentle, easy opening challenge for you. Nothing to scare a seasoned campaigner. Best of luck – and, of course, the evidence will reach me in the form of the completed photo set.

I look forward to viewing it.

Love

Lloyd.

I put the note down, waiting for the sinking feeling to hit the pit of my stomach before inhaling.

Lloyd knows I hate having my photo taken.

Ridiculous, isn’t it? It’s not as if I’m shy. I’ve put out and opened up for so many men. I’ve worn outrageous outfits. I’ve demonstrated sex toys at live events. I’ve even danced in a peep-show booth. But there’s something about the camera that scares me. It captures you, holds you in a moment, forces you to see yourself the way you are seen by others. I find that scrutiny very difficult to take. It reminds me to be self-conscious, something I rarely am. I don’t need the reminder.

I have enough pictures of Lloyd to fill a gallery, but the only extant photographs of myself in the last two years are a head shot on the hotel website and a picture of my arse taken on his mobile phone.

He has set me up to fail.

‘Damn you, Ellison,’ I murmur, picking up the business card.

She is called Sasha Margetts. She has all the right letters after her name, but underneath it I read ‘Boudoir and Erotic’. Is this where wannabe porn starlets go for their portfolio shots? I wonder. Will she have me licking suggestively on a lollipop while I shake my airbrushed booty? Or will it all be dead tasteful with soft lighting and feathers covering the rude bits? Only one way to find out …

I reach for the phone at least a dozen times before finally going through with the call. I contemplate ringing Lloyd first and haranguing him for picking such an odious task, but that would only give him some kind of perverse satisfaction, so I don’t. I’m not going to fail this on the nursery slopes.

‘Hello, Sasha Margetts.’

‘Hi, my name’s Sophie Martin.’

‘Oh, yes, my afternoon booking! Is it still OK? Can you make it?’

‘I think so. Not sure of the exact time though – I didn’t make the booking myself.’

‘Oh no, that’s right. It was your agent, wasn’t it? Lloyd?’

I have to take a very deep breath. My agent? ‘S’right,’ I manage.

‘Well, I’ll be ready for you at two. Do you know where we are?’

‘Your card says Carrington Mews – I think that’s quite near here. Sloane Square tube station?’

‘Yes, that’s the closest. We’ll do the solo shots first.’

‘We’ll … solo shots?’ I struggle to make sense of this. Does she mean that there will be another model in some of the photographs?

‘Yes. You don’t need to bring anything, by the way. I’ve a full wardrobe of costumes and props and I’ll do make-up here. So, two o’clock then?’

‘Yeah. Great.’ I put the phone down, and then I can’t prevent myself calling Lloyd. ‘Lloyd!’

He chuckles down the phone at me. ‘You got it then?’

‘What the fuck does she mean? “We’ll do the solo shots first”? What does that mean? What else did you tell her to do?’

‘Wait and see.’

‘I think, as my agent, you should keep me in the loop.’

‘I think, as the orchestrator of the challenge, I should make this as hard for you as I can. Ah, why did I say that? “Hard for you.” I think I am. Thinking about what’s going to happen –’

‘Which is?’

‘As I said before –’

‘Oh, don’t bother.’ I hang up.

I look at the clock. Eleven fifteen. Am I going to do this?

Yes, I am. Failure is not an option.

I think about changing for the appointment, but in the end I turn up in the chichi Chelsea courtyard in the same charcoal-grey skirt suit I wore to work. At least Sasha Margetts will see that I am not some Botoxed bimbo but a bona fide businesswoman who doesn’t get messed around.

Though I suspect I might get messed up.

The door is answered by a smiling woman in her forties, casually but expensively dressed, giving every impression of a model-turned-photographer. In fact, I think I vaguely recognise her.

‘Yes, yes,’ she laughs, responding to my quizzical frown. ‘Sash Derby as was. That’s me.’

‘Oh God. It is you, isn’t it? I remember those perfume adverts you did.’

We climb a staircase, quoting in unison the corny line she had had to speak.

‘I know, dreadful, weren’t they?’ she says, ushering me into a vast white studio space, lined and surrounded with clothes racks and storage units. ‘I much prefer what I do now. No more pouting and trying to look mysterious. Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean …’

‘It’s fine. I’m not really a model. I’m a hotelier.’

‘Oh? But you want to break into the scene, your agent said.’ She stands over by a small sink unit and waves a kettle at me. ‘Tea? Coffee? Or sometimes my models need a tot of something stronger, just to dispel the nerves.’

‘He said that, did he? Oh, tea’s fine. White, no sugar.’

‘Isn’t it true?’

‘Oh, if he says it is, I’m sure it is.’ I’m skirting close to a fail, I think. I have to go with the flow. She has been given a story, and it’s my job to stick to it. ‘The hotel’s great, but I’m looking for something on the side. Where I can express myself.’

‘That’s terrific. That’s what we need to discuss. How do we best express you, your personality and your individuality, through the medium of my camera?’

Stumped, I look for inspiration amongst the portraits on the wall. Most are innocuous enough – beautiful girls in cashmere wraps or naked but for jewellery. Until you look at their faces. Rapt, caught in another world, another state of being. Their vulnerability is shocking and arousing.

‘Seems to me,’ I say, trying not to let my voice tremble, ‘that I won’t get much choice in that. One’s face does what it does at that crucial moment.’

‘Yes, you can’t fake it.’ Sash appears at my shoulder, inspecting her work along with me. ‘It’s a moment when you are nothing but yourself. The masks peeled off, the face metaphorically bare.’

‘That’s a strangely frightening thought.’

She puts her hand on my shoulder. I’m not tactile, outside the bedroom, and I flinch a little.

‘You’re not the first person to think so. Come on. Sit down and we’ll talk about your needs.’

I take my tea and perch on her white leather sofa. ‘Didn’t Lloyd give you any idea of what was wanted?’

She laughs. ‘Oh yes, he did. But I’m starting with you. You’re the girl in the picture. What are you getting out of this?’

A win. I’m getting to win.

‘I’m getting to represent myself as what I am.’

‘Which is?’

‘An insatiable whore.’

She is taken aback. For a moment, all she can do is stare at me.

‘Sorry not to put it more delicately,’ I say. ‘I suppose people generally say that they want to express their flowering sexuality or their empowering femininity or whatever. But I don’t dress it up. I’m not a flowery feminine sexually empowered blah-de-blah. I’m an insatiable whore. That’s what you’ll see. That’s what you’ll get.’

Sash sips at her tea.

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘You sound a little bit angry. Are you sure you want to do this?’

‘I’m only angry because people don’t like insatiable whores. Well, they do really, but they won’t admit it, so we get bad press. It’s not fair, is it?’

‘I suppose not. So, when we pick props you want something fairly full-on? Aggressively sexual, almost?’

‘Yeah.’ I think of Lloyd looking at the photos, knowing that I hate standing behind a camera. I want him to know how I feel about it. ‘Aggressively sexual. That hits my spot.’

‘That’s a powerful concept. We could build some strong images around it. You’re a woman in charge of your sexuality, using it freely, without guilt. Actually, I can really work with that.’ Sasha’s face lights up. ‘This could be a wonderful set. Come and pick some props.’

Sasha has every type of luxe fabric and body decoration imaginable. I run my fingers through marabou and faux fur and lace and ropes of pearls. In another box, she has her kinky stuff. It looks tempting, but I’m not going to be tied up or trussed for this shoot. I’m going to be free.

‘I don’t want props,’ I decide. ‘Maybe just that chair. Just me, in the buff, on a chair. Keep it simple, yeah?’

‘I think simplicity will be the key to this set. It’s all about you and your attitude. Are you ready? Do you want to take off your clothes now?’

I distract her while I strip off my business suit by talking about the make and model of her camera. I want her to know that I know my stuff. I want her to know what she is dealing with.

By the time I’m down to my black bra and knickers, we have covered image processors and the respective merits of manual and automatic focus adjustment.

‘Do you want some underwear shots first?’ she asks politely.

‘Nah.’ I look her in the eye as I unhook my bra then ease down my panties. I maintain a smile that I hope isn’t too forced. ‘Let’s start as we mean to go on.’

I fling up my arms to reveal everything, my breasts rising to optimum presentability as my hands stretch high.

‘OK, OK, keep this pose, legs wide, arms up, looking straight at me. Lovely, perfect, that’s great, Sophie.’

Light flashes, pow pow pow, while I face down the lens, my expression almost a scowl. Not a come hither, but a come and get it if you dare.

I move to the chair and sit, legs akimbo, imagining the photographs and how Lloyd will feel when he sees them. I glare, thrust out my chest, kick out my legs, cup my breasts, snarl, muss my hair, bend my knees and, finally, when Sash has melted away and become her camera, I put my hand flat on my crotch, between my pussy lips and throw back my head.

‘Are you ready for this, Sophie?’ Sash’s voice is gentle and breathy. I wonder briefly if this turns her on. Is this her perversion?

‘Ready to wank for the camera? Bring it on.’

She exhales, almost whistling, and lines herself up behind the viewfinder, hand on the button. Not the same button I have my hand on.

‘Tell me what gets you off, Sophie. What do you think about when you touch yourself?’

‘I think about how much I need it. How much I want a cock. How much I want to be bent over with something thick and hard pushing into me, pinning me down.’

‘Lovely. Go on.’ Pow pow pow. I draw languid circles around my clit.

‘I think of all the men I’ve had. Men and women. All the tongues that have licked me, all the arms that have held me down, all the come I’ve swallowed, all the cocks I’ve had in my cunt and my arse, so many, loads of them, loads of loads, all shot in me.’

Pow pow pow. I breathe more deeply, dig more deeply, rubbing faster.

‘Are you really insatiable?’

‘God, yeah, ask anyone at the hotel. Ask Lloyd. He can do me four, five times a day but I’ll still try for more. Before we got together I used to pick up strangers, just because I wanted to. They used to offer me money, think I must be a prostitute. When they found out I was just a slut, they thought all their Christmases had come at once. They came back, and they brought their friends, and my life was one long, hot gang-bang, cock after cock after cock …’

‘But now Lloyd’s fucking you?’

‘Yeah, but he likes to watch too. He gets off on me being this horny bitch who needs it all the time. That’s why I’m here … I think … I can’t remember …’

‘Stop thinking. Just work yourself, get yourself there.’

‘He wants the world to know it. He wants everyone to know I’m a sex-mad whore with a cunt that’s open all hours. Everyone will see this, everyone will look at my face and see it … oh.’

That’s it. It’s done. I have been staring at the camera lens all the while, but now, after one stunned stretch of my eyes I have to screw them shut, have to hide from that implacable gaze while the impulses sweep and swoop through my nervous system and gush out through my clit.

‘Oh Sophie,’ whispers Sash, clicking her last and rushing over to take my hands and stroke them. ‘That was perfect. That was astonishing. Are you all right?’

‘Uh-huh. Gimme a minute.’

The doorbell rings.

‘Ah, that’ll be him.’

I stop lolling and sit bolt upright, thighs clamped shut, arms crossed over breasts. Him?

The solo shots are done, but there is more to come.

Sash slips away down the stairs. I hear her unbolt and open the door, but the voices are too faint to pick up. As the sound of feet hits the steps again, I grab a fur throw out of the prop box and wrap myself in it before the company arrives.

‘Oh, don’t cover up on my account.’

‘Lloyd!’

I give him my fiercest glare, but he is unruffled, threading his way past the tripod and camera towards me.

‘Who’s looking after the hotel?’

‘Kathleen’s fine for a couple of hours. There’s nothing exciting going on.’

‘Famous last words.’

He touches the side of my face, just above my temple, but I draw away, angry with him about all kinds of things, only some of which I can identify.

‘Chill,’ he says. ‘Smile. You’re on candid camera.’

‘A bit too bloody candid,’ I grumble.

‘I thought you’d be in your element.’

‘Do you want to see what we’ve got so far?’ invites Sophie, and he goes to join her as she fast-forwards through a few digital stills.

‘Come and see, Sophie,’ he says, but I don’t want to look at them. ‘Suit yourself,’ he mutters.

I watch him from the corner of my eye. His lips are curled up at one side, as if something amuses him, but his eyes are intensely focused, almost anxious. ‘I remember when you used to look at me like that,’ he says.

‘I was looking at you.’

‘Back when I worked in the cocktail bar. You always had this look. Kind of “I want you, but I hate that I want you, so I’ll pretend to myself that I don’t.” Remember?’

‘No. Because I didn’t want you. Not back then.’

‘Yes, you did.’

His flat assertion needles me, and makes me question myself. Is he right? Did I want him without knowing it? What were the implications of that? Were my thoughts not to be trusted?

Sash switches off the viewer and claps her hands, dispelling the tension. ‘So. Lloyd. You had some ideas for this section of the shoot, I believe.’

‘Yeah. Soph, come over here.’

He sounds conciliatory, a little exasperated. He sits on the sofa and pats the space beside him. I wonder if he wants me to fail or succeed. Which would be the better outcome for him?

I sit next to him, but not on the side he indicates. Instead, his discarded jacket lies between us, a no-man’s-land of light-grey pure wool.

‘What are you going to make me do?’

‘Oh goodness, I only photograph consenting subjects!’ exclaims Sasha. ‘There’s no forcing involved.’

Lloyd turns so his face isn’t visible to her and mouths the word ‘Fail’ with a raise of his eyebrows. I have to save this if I want to pass the test.

‘It’s OK,’ I say. ‘Lloyd and I … we have this sparring kind of relationship. It’s just our idea of fun.’

‘I see,’ says Sash, but I doubt she really does.

‘We like to push each other’s boundaries,’ he adds. ‘Challenge each other. That’s what this is all about, really.’

‘A challenge?’

‘Exploring limits,’ he says. ‘Isn’t it, Soph?’

‘Something like that.’

‘So, I told Sasha we could do some action shots.’

‘By action you mean …?’

‘Sex.’

‘Porn?’

‘No!’ trills Sasha. ‘I don’t do porn. I do erotic and boudoir. These will be sensual, non-explicit shots of your faces and upper bodies during the act of love.’

I nearly vomit. The act of love. With his customary presence of mind, Lloyd speaks hastily over my incipient snort.

‘Of course, we understand that. Sophie’s being cheeky.’ He gives my wrist a little tap. ‘Bad Sophie.’

The bastard has me hot again. Fuck him. How dare he?

I move a little closer to him, rumpling the jacket. He reaches an arm behind me, pressing a fingertip to the nape of my neck, a small but devastating connection. I start to believe that I can do this. My breathing deepens.

‘So, I can fold out the couch for you to use,’ suggests Sash. ‘Or I can put cushions on the floor, or in the cupboard I have a sex chair, even a swing …’

‘A swing! Ooh, exciting! Can I see?’

‘I was going to say I don’t really recommend the swing. I have to be seriously on top of my game to get good shots from it. It’s just so … swingy.’

‘Well, the sex chair then? Lloyd?’

‘Yeah, sex chair sounds interesting.’

‘OK, I’ll get it out. Can I get you two a drink while I set it up?’

‘No,’ says Lloyd. ‘We’ll just get warmed up.’

And, without warning, he tilts my head and swoops down to claim my lips. God knows what happens to his jacket, but we crush it between us, too caught up in arms and legs to care about its pristine creaselessness.

‘So,’ he questions me, between thrusts of tongue, ‘did you come just now? For the camera?’

‘Shut up. You know I did.’

‘I wondered if you would.’ Tongue goes back in, tongue draws back out. ‘But you’re so flushed. I love it when you’re flushed.’ More kissing. ‘I can’t wait to see the pictures.’

‘Who says I’ll show them to you?’

‘Oh, they’ll come to me first. I’m paying for them.’ His leg wedges itself over mine, trapping me underneath it.

‘I hate to think how much they’ll cost.’

‘Hmm, well, yeah, so do I.’ He kisses me again, the longest, dirtiest snog so far. ‘But I’m thinking of it as an investment.’

‘Oh my!’ Sash interrupts us from the centre of the floor. ‘Please come and do that for my camera. You have such chemistry.’

I cast a bleary look over to the chair she has assembled. It’s not what I imagined. For some reason I thought it would be a dungeon fixture with cuffs and stuff – in fact, it is a simple padded S-shape in expensive-looking zebra print leather. It’s almost more a bed than a chair, good and wide and full of possibilities.

‘So this is a sex chair?’ Lloyd rises to his feet, freeing me from my limb bondage.

‘There are various designs,’ says Sash.

‘I know. I haven’t seen this type before though. It looks so comfortable.’

She laughs, patting the padded upholstery. ‘It is. Come and see for yourself.’

She flits back to her camera, preparing for the highlight of the set. ‘So then, Lloyd. Time for your striptease. Now, you’re a male model, you need to bust out the moves.’

He mock-snarls at me and does that whip-cracking belt buckle thing that makes my knees weak. It lands on the floor in a curl of shiny leather, reminding me of all the times I’ve been struck with it.

Once the socks and tie are disposed of, he deals with the trousers, stepping out of them elegantly, then removing his pants so that he stands in only his long white work shirt, open at the collar, linked at the cuffs.

The inevitable fiddling with cuff links leads to the moment of revelation – the slow unbuttoning of the shirt, opening up on to a pale freckled chest, a stomach flatter than it used to be (must be all the sex) and then finally powerful thighs framing a cock in full-blooded erection.

It astonishes me that I used be indifferent to Lloyd. As he shrugs the shirt over his shoulders, I want nothing more than to pull him on top of me and shag him into the fifth dimension. It’s not about his looks. It’s about the looks he gives me. Nothing sends an arrow of devastating lust straight to my sex as fast as one crinkle of a Lloyd eye, one curl of a Lloyd lip.

The familiar alarms ring and buzz in my body. A man stands before me and he means to have me and there ain’t nothin’ I can do about it.

He waves a hand at the chair. ‘Shall we?’

I bend over it. ‘How do we do this? What’s the best way?’

He sits himself in the shallow bend of the S and clasps his hands together behind his head, letting his legs rise up and then drop down over the seductive leather curves.

‘This feels good to me,’ he says. ‘Hop on.’

His lazy, entitled posturing inflames me, as he knows it will. I leap on and straddle him, giving the side of his head a playful slap.

‘So very fucking romantic, aren’t you?’ I chide. ‘Hop on. Charming.’

‘Sorry, should I have invited you to step aboard the lurve ride?’

I kick my legs, which dangle either side of the chair, causing me to jolt and rock a little on his pelvis. He yelps and grabs my hips, stilling me.

‘Play nicely now. Best behaviour for the lady.’

The tips of our noses touch. I pretend to bite him, snapping my teeth together. He forces a kiss, which I pretend to struggle against, enjoying as ever the combative nature of our relationship.

I emerge from the kiss panting and grinding my hips, violent joy coursing through my blood.

‘Are you going to behave yourself?’ he whispers. ‘Hmm?’ He gives my bottom a light smack.

‘Never,’ I reply.

His smile is broad and white. ‘Say cheese.’

‘I’ll give you cheese.’

‘Thanks. Got any crackers?’

‘You’re bloody crackers.’

He catches me again, lips on lips, his hand cupping my bottom, pulling me towards him. His cock butts my thigh. I reach down for it, curling fingers around its fat width. Soon it will be inside me. Do I have to wait long? I move it so that its tip sits between my labia, up and down, gathering juice, round and round my engorging clit.

He grabs my wrist and lifts my hand off his cock. ‘Not so fast,’ he whispers. ‘Let’s take our time. Let’s build up slowly.’

‘But you’re already …’

‘I know. I don’t care. Nice and slow. No rush.’ He buries his face in my neck and kisses hard. I hold on to the back of his head, run a hand down his shoulder blades, feeling the muscles flex and move under the skin. His hands toy with my breasts, circling my nipples with practised fingers. His hard cock eases up and down my thigh. I try to crouch on to it, but he holds me above it, keeping me in a state of suspended readiness.

Flashes of light behind my eyes remind me that there is photography going on, but I am away from that world now, deep inside my other self.

‘You’re gorgeous, Sophie, you’re so fucking gorgeous. You make me want you all the time. Oh God.’

He takes a long time licking one nipple then the other. I gyrate my pelvis, my mouth wide open, eyes glazed, loving the feel of his arms propping me up. One of his hands strays down my side, over the bump of my hip, then it flashes across a thigh and finds the target.

He releases my nipple from his mouth.

‘You’re wet,’ he says.

‘You’re Captain fucking Obvious,’ I hiss into his ear.

‘Any more of your lip and I won’t fuck you. How about that?’

‘Don’t you dare.’

‘I know you wouldn’t like that. Because you really are so … very … wet.’ He dabbles his fingers in the juices then pushes them into my mouth, making me taste myself. ‘There’s a lot more where that came from. Why are you so wet, Sophie?’

He removes his fingers, allowing me to speak.

‘Want it,’ I say, jerking my pelvis forwards, bending his cock to my will.

‘Want what?’

‘Your cock.’

‘Where?’

‘In here.’ I catch him in my slit. If only it could snap shut like a Venus flytrap, keep him there to devour at my leisure. I rock back and forth, rubbing his tip, preparing to push down on it.

‘How much do you want it?’

‘So much, so much.’

‘What would you do for it?’

‘Anything.’

‘I’ll get that in writing.’

‘Just put it in, for fuck’s sake. Just fuck me. Now.’

He kisses me, chuckling into my mouth, dark and low. ‘If you insist. Act of Love commencing in three … two … one …’

He cups the undermost innermost part of my buttocks and pulls them wide, opening me up to him, then slides in slowly. I try to pack him all in at once, greedy for his stretching, spreading girth, but he holds me in check, making sure I feel each maddening inch as it glides past my barriers.

The sex chair’s great advantage is the way it aligns Lloyd’s pelvic bone with my clitoris. All I have to do is circle my hips with minimal effort and I can have all the multiple orgasms I want. I narrow my eyes and grin at Lloyd, who seems to have clocked on to my evil plan.

‘Oh no you don’t,’ he murmurs, lifting my hips and urging me forwards, making me thrust. Better still, the two sensations combine, working my pussy into a fomentation of colliding pleasures.

‘Ohh,’ I sigh, almost overwhelmed. ‘This is good. Really good. Let’s get one.’

Lloyd has gone to a realm beyond speech, at last, and I work on the perfect rhythm, ending each forward thrust with a little circular rub of my clit against him, building myself up so sweetly.

Even better, I realise that a very slight adjustment of my feet so that they rise a little from the floor nudges Lloyd’s cock right up to my G-spot. I anchor myself to his shoulders and push, push, push, three fast strokes bringing me to an orgasm that starts in my toes and engulfs my whole body like wildfire.

‘Oh yes.’ He finds his voice to mutter into my hair. ‘That’s what you need, darling, lots of that, more of that, yeah.’

While I am still bathing in the radiant waves of my climax, he flips me over and takes control of the coupling, powering into me while my eyes try to focus on his face above, blinking and rolling back, never quite coming back down until he reaches his own fierce conclusion. I have to keep my eyes open because his face when he comes is something I can never get enough of. If I could get a picture of it … oh.

The camera flashes. He shakes his head, still in that heart-warming welter of post-orgasmic confusion, and stares at me. He looks so helpless, so stunned. What just happened? his eyes seem to ask. Where am I?

I reach up to cradle him, bringing his head down to my chest. I shut my eyes and hold him, stroking his slick damp hair, feeling my heart bump into his cheek.

A line from a song by Marc Almond slips into my head. Tenderness is a weakness … Is it?

I’m so comfortable, so at peace here on this strange piece of furniture that I could almost fall asleep.

But small scuffling movements from the corner remind me that we are not alone, and presumably this strikes Lloyd at the same time. He lifts his head, kisses me and looks over at Sasha. I look too, but she is obscured by the camera, discreetly ‘not here’.

He looks back down at me. ‘Amazing,’ he says.

‘As ever,’ I say.

‘Thanks.’

‘I think I had a hand in it too!’

‘More than a hand.’ He smiles and looks back at Sasha. ‘So was that OK?’

‘Oh, don’t ask me,’ she says with a self-conscious giggle. ‘I think that’s between the two of you. But the camera loved it.’

‘That’s great,’ he says.

‘Do you want to go through to the shower? I’ll put the kettle on.’ She scuttles off to the sink, turning her back on us.

Lloyd rears up and pulls out of me. He runs a hand through his hair, shutting his eyes for a moment, re-orientating. ‘Shower, then.’ He picks up his clothes, frowns at the terrible state of his jacket and gives me an encouraging nod. ‘Oh dear,’ he says, clicking his tongue. ‘Can’t you stand? Poor afflicted thing.’

‘Shut up. Of course I can stand.’ I swing my legs over the side and give a fair impression of Bambi’s first few upright seconds. Lloyd swoops forwards and helps me. ‘So gallant, proper Sir Walter Raleigh, aren’t you?’

From the kitchen corner, Sasha snorts. ‘Are you two always like this?’ she asks, without turning around.

I pick up my neatly folded clothes and hug them to my chest. ‘Always.’

In the shower, Lloyd directs the water over my breasts and my sticky thighs.

‘You didn’t fail then,’ he says, sounding disappointed.

‘Did you think I would?’

‘I need to up my game.’

The jets spray on to my breasts, tingling my nipples. Lloyd cups the underside of my breasts, holding them in place while he keeps the shower head no more than an inch above them.

‘What’s next?’ I ask, flexing my toes, splashing them in the lovely warm water. ‘Sex while parachuting from a plane? In a canoe going over a waterfall? In space?’

He puts the shower head back in its cradle, takes the bottle of gel cleanser, squirts it into his hand, lathers it up around my breasts and stomach and shoulders.

‘Yeah,’ he says, with an enigmatic look. ‘You keep thinking along those lines, Soph.’

‘What do you mean?’

He smothers me with bubbling foam and pulls me against him so our chests slip and slide together. Water rains into our mouths while we kiss, leaking into the cracks of lips, dripping off our noses, clogging up our eyelashes.

He turns me around and washes my back and bottom, very thoroughly, far more thoroughly than is quite necessary.

‘I mean what I mean,’ he says, letting the suds slip down the crack of my arse, parting the cheeks, massaging the slightly stinging soap inside.

‘As Confucius would say. What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It’s supposed to mean what it’s supposed to mean.’

I try to slap him, but it isn’t easy when you’re facing the wrong way and he has his hands on your bum. I manage an awkward collision of elbow (mine) and hip (his) and reap my inevitable reward.

‘Ouch!’ I always forget that a smack on a wet bottom is worth about three on a dry one.

‘Impatient,’ he reproves, keeping me close and tight with an arm around my ribs. Something semi-hard pushes into my right buttock, distracting me from the newly laid sting. ‘All will be revealed in time.’

I lean my head back on his shoulder, looking up while he looks down.

‘You know, I really hate you, Lloyd.’

He nuzzles his nose against my cheek and kisses the space beneath my ear.

‘Mmm, I know you do. That’s why you’re always so wet for me.’

‘That’s because I’m in the shower.’

‘Not all the other times. All the dozens of scores of hundreds of other times. All those times you’ve begged me, on your wide-open knees …’

‘That’s because I’m trying to kill you with sex. I’ll do it one day.’

‘Mmm, best assassination technique ever.’

His hands are low now, fingers moving down with the trickles of water, flowing and meeting at the delta of my sex. He holds me by my cunt and bites down into the softness of my neck.

I give in to it. My body knows no other way. I spread my feet further apart, granting him full access to my lips and clit and vagina, all so recently used by him.

The water provides an extra element of friction when he starts the slow up-down rubbing of my clit with the side of his hand. It almost feels rough, refractory, needing extra force, which he gives.

Because I am facing away from him, I can see the way his arm crosses my body, watch the sinews move beneath the skin, slide my gaze down to his wrist, see the point where the fingers bend and disappear beneath me. Watching the intricate interplay of those muscles, knowing but not seeing what they are working on, is powerfully aphrodisiac. I can see what he is doing, and I can feel what he is doing at the same time.

But then he changes tack, puts his hands on my thighs and slides down behind me until he is on his knees. A tongue joins the lapping water at my pussy, a strong push brings it between my lips. I pivot at the hips and press my palms flat against the wall, holding myself up, keeping myself in position for more of this oral delight.

It’s as if he drinks the warm water away, lapping it up, replacing it with his own luscious licking, cleaning me to make me dirty.

I drip into his mouth, rotating my hips, beginning to moan. He holds me fast, flicks that tongue faster, flicking the engorged bead of my clit over and over. My palms begin to slide. I fear I might fall, but he claps his hands on my hips, keeping me upright.

In the cage frame of his arms, my body slumps. My core burns and blooms, ribbons of sensation unfurling inside me, gushing out to join the combined waters of his tongue and the hot water pipe. I become a fountain.

My splashing self slips down to the tiled shower basin. I want to lie there while the droplets cover and bathe me. But Lloyd has other ideas.

Still on his knees, he clears his throat and looks forlornly down at his erection.

His hair plastered to his scalp, his eyelashes brimming with water-sparkles, his face clean and shining, he looks too completely fucking adorable. I can’t resist him. I haul myself to my knees facing him and take his testicles in my hands, testing them for firmness and fullness. Lloyd has seemingly endless supplies of testosterone, as his cock testifies.

I suck him gently at first, then with increasing urgency, pinching the base of his shaft, squeezing his balls, getting my lips down lower and lower until he is deep in my throat. My cheeks are wet when his thick load of cream shoots into my mouth, but the shower isn’t the only reason for that. There’s a saline element to the damp patches, a stickiness.

When I lie back in his arms, letting the water engulf us both, I hope he hasn’t noticed, but the way he traces a finger beneath the lower lid of both my eyes suggests he has.

## Chapter Three

‘Someday my prints will come,’ I sing, checking through the mail while Lloyd pores over a spreadsheet at the desk. ‘But not today.’

He glances over. ‘No sign of the photos? She said it would be a couple of weeks.’

‘It’s been a couple of weeks.’

‘Yeah, fourteen days exactly. Cut her some slack. She probably wants to hang on to them a bit longer for her own personal use.’

‘Ugh, shut up. I don’t want them used as masturbation aids. Unless it’s by me.’ I open a big A4 envelope. ‘Cool, Fashion Forward wants to do a shoot in the restaurant and a couple of the penthouse suites. They’ve sent a contract.’

‘Uh-huh. What’s that one?’

He points to a less glamorous envelope, a thin brown one tossed aside to be dealt with once the post with posh watermarks has been opened.

‘Dunno, looks like … it isn’t stamped.’ I look sharply up at Lloyd. His face answers my question, a little bit tense, a little bit excited.

He feigns absorption in his spreadsheet, but I can tell he’s watching me from the corner of his eye. I slide a fingernail under the loosely gummed flap, watching him back.

A compliment slip flutters out, one of the hotel’s own.

On it, in Lloyd’s handwriting:

Whip me, hurt me, any way you want me

As long as you want me, it’s all right.

I hold it out to him. ‘What’s the meaning of this?’

‘I booked one of the dungeons at Fetish Fantasy.’

‘We’ve done that before. More than once.’

‘Not this way. As the note implies, I don’t want to be in charge this time.’

‘You never are in charge.’

‘I don’t want to play at being in charge this time,’ he amends. ‘I want you to get your kinky boots on and practise flexing that whip hand.’ He leans forwards in his chair, his pupils skittering from side to side, his lips wet. ‘I want you to hurt me.’

He sounds like he means it. But …

‘When have you ever been interested in pain?’

‘I’m not. I’m dreading it, actually. I’m hoping you’ll be more into the mental domination stuff.’

‘I’m not really into any domination stuff,’ I point out. ‘I’ve only ever been on the receiving end.’

‘Well, that’s what makes it a challenge, isn’t it? It’s new, it’s exciting, you get to wear loads of fucking sexy gear … you don’t look convinced.’

I blink at him, trying to imagine what his face looks in pain. I don’t want to imagine it, though. I really don’t.

‘Come on, Soph. You’d have killed for the chance to do me some serious damage not so long ago. Now’s your chance to let it all out. Show me the red-in-tooth-and-claw Sophie, the take-no-prisoners Sophie, the woman who’s always one hundred per cent in control.’

‘That’s why I like submission,’ I grumble. ‘It’s a holiday from all that.’

‘Well, have a busman’s holiday then. Or am I sensing the delicate aroma of …’ He sniffs the air. ‘Failure.’

‘Fuck off. It’ll be easy enough. Just … I don’t know. Nothing. It’s fine. Let’s do it.’

Lloyd claps his hands with apparent delight. ‘Can’t wait for you to walk all over me in your spike-heeled thigh-high boots,’ he claims.

‘I’m not sure I believe you. But neither can I.’

‘Great. I’ve booked it for midnight. They suggest you get there half an hour beforehand to pick out your costume and select your instruments of torture and terror. I’ll see you there.’

He launches himself out of the chair, kisses me passionately until I almost fall over, then waltzes off to take his lunch break.

I sit myself down in the chair he has vacated and stare at the computer screen, a sea of meaningless figures in rectangular boxes.

It strikes me now as more than a little odd that I’ve never done anything like this before. Call myself a hussy … Yet somehow I’ve always managed to signal my desire to submit rather than dominate before the action has reached its crisis. Nobody has ever asked me to hurt them, though one man once wanted me to tie him up and tease him. That was easy enough, though, just a bit of fun.

This seems much more serious.

***

By eleven thirty I am in the giant fancy-dress wardrobe at Fetish Fantasy, being shown around by its proud mistress, Zuleika.

I have in mind something skintight and shiny, and she obliges by finding the perfect figure-hugging number in wet-look latex. Once she has talcum-powdered and trussed me into it, I peer at myself in the mirrored wall, searching for bulges of unforgiving flesh, but the rubber nips it all in, giving me a catwoman silhouette I think I might wear more often.

When I turn around and look over my shoulder at the generous swell of my bottom, I almost purr with satisfaction. Lloyd is going to love that.

But he’s going to have to be content with looking at it.

Tonight, he gets nowhere near my arse.

‘So, I think we were thinking of killer heels,’ I tell Zuleika, but she is well ahead of me. Already she has picked out the ideal pair, and she sets to work lacing me into them, threading through the hooks and eyes until I am crisscrossed to the thigh and towering on five inches of potential murder weapon. The world looks different from up here.

Zuleika grins, her eyebrows disappearing into her bright pink fringe. ‘It’s a new view, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘You look down on people.’

I’ve never been remotely statuesque, but my inner goddess peeks out now from her clamshell-tight hiding place. I can almost see her in the mirror. What else do I need to coax her further?

‘How do you want your hair? Some dommes like it in a really tight high plait or ponytail. Or you can have it loose.’

My hair isn’t really long enough to flow gloriously and luxuriantly and all that jazz, but I’m not sure the high hairline look suits me either.

‘Can I just do some kind of hairband?’

A black sparkly number pushes any errant wisps out of my face. I paint my eyes black and my lips red and grin at myself.

‘I have this urge to call everyone “darling” now,’ I tell Zuleika. ‘In a stagey drawl. Oh, daaaaaaarling, do as you’re told, sweetie, or I might have to hurt your lovely little … well, you get the picture.’

Zuleika narrows her eyes and smiles. ‘You’re missing the critical accessory,’ she says. ‘What’s it to be, Miss Whiplash? Flogger? Riding crop?’

‘Both.’

In the dungeon, I take a good look around, mentally listing the things I might want to use. I need to prepare for this scene, since it’s so foreign to me, and making a rigid plan comforts me and gives me confidence. I like the cuffs that hang from a hook in a ceiling – tick. I like the blindfold, but then he won’t get to see me as a glorious vision in latex, so no tick for that. And a strap-on … hmmm. Now, that could make an interesting finale …

There is a knock at the dungeon door, an echoing clang that makes my heart thump.

I arrange myself so that one foot is on a chair, leg bent at the knee. I hold the riding crop diagonally across my chest, tapping its leather tip over my shoulder. I thrust out my breasts and hold my chin up.

‘Enter.’

He pushes the door open slowly. I tense my cheek muscles so as not to smile when I see the look in his eyes. Is that awe? I think it might be.

‘Christ, Sophie –’

‘You’re late.’ I let the crop slice the air, loving its brutally efficient sound. ‘And you may call me “ma’am”.’

‘I’m not late,’ laughs Lloyd, checking his wristwatch. ‘It’s the witching hour, on the dot. Ma’am.’

‘I don’t care to be contradicted, boy, and neither do I like your tone.’

I point the crop at him, removing my foot from the chair and swaying as elegantly as I can on the vertiginous heels towards my quarry. I stop when the crop makes contact with his chest.

There is still some residual amusement in his expression, but it’s quickly being replaced by a kind of fascinated dread.

I move the crop up and tap the underside of his chin, once, twice, thrice. ‘You are going to learn to do as you’re told tonight, boy,’ I tell him. ‘And you can start by getting out of those ridiculous clothes.’

They aren’t really ridiculous – jeans and a dark top, suede lace-ups, dull socks – but I’m trying out the taste of belittling language on my tongue, testing it for bitterness. Besides, Lloyd deserves to suffer, doesn’t he? For being such a bastard shaggable gorgeous twatface.

He hesitates, waiting for me to retract the crop, I suppose.

‘Go on!’ My voice rings out, twenty times more confident than I feel. ‘Strip.’

I step back and slap the crop in the palm of my hand while he lifts the top over his head. The dungeon is flatteringly lit with low, flickering candle-style bulbs – not quite as atmospheric as real flame, but I guess a BDSM club needs to keep a closer eye than most on health and safety. The shadowy light casts patterns over Lloyd’s pale bare chest and gives his hair a copper shine. He isn’t meant to know that my mouth is watering, though, so I try to remain impassive while he removes shoes and socks then drops his jeans. After stepping out of them, his hands move to his underpants, but I wave the crop and shake my head.

‘No, no. I want to take those off myself. Come over here.’

He moves closer on his bare feet until we are eye to eye. It is odd to be so much taller; we are practically the same height now.

I put down the crop and rest both of my hands in their fingerless latex gloves on his hips. I curl my forefingers inside the elastic of his boxers and then let go so it snaps back lightly against his skin.

‘Why do you wear these, boy?’

‘What, pants?’

‘No, boxers. Why do you wear this style?’

‘Er, why do I wear them? Well, they’re comfortable, I suppose. Loose. I don’t feel hemmed in.’

‘Why might you feel hemmed in?’

He gives me a quizzical look. He has no idea where I’m going with this. I’m not sure I do either.

‘Well, as a man, I have certain anatomical features, which you may have noticed.’

‘You have a cock. I’ve noticed. I’ve also noticed that it seems to rule your life, boy.’

‘Said the pot to the kettle.’

‘Excuse me! I don’t have a cock and besides, that’s highly disrespectful and I’ll have to punish you for it.’ I give him my darkest frown. He visibly subsides. ‘What I mean to say is that you wear that particular style of underwear because it doesn’t hurt you when you get hard. Don’t you?’

‘Maybe.’ Shifty eyes flick down to the floor.

‘Because you’re a disgusting pervert who can’t look at a woman without getting an erection, aren’t you? You’re a sleazy sex-mad creep whose mind never leaves the gutter …’ I have to stop. I’m going to laugh. This is so hypocritical, and if he doesn’t make some wisecrack that completely kills the scene after about five seconds more of this, he isn’t the man I think he is. ‘Let’s just have them off, shall we?’

I wrench them down, almost bending his cock out of shape so that he hisses in a breath.

‘Fragile, is it?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Why is it hard? What are you thinking of, to make it so hard already?’

‘I’m thinking of your arse in that shiny outfit, actually, ma’am.’

‘Dirty, dirty boy.’ I reach out and grip his balls, giving them a good squeeze. ‘You’ve got lots of juice stored up for me, haven’t you? Lots and lots of it. I expect you’d like to release a little bit of that, wouldn’t you?’

‘I wouldn’t … say no,’ he gasps. He is looking at me with stunned respect. I think he’s enjoying himself more than he expected to.

‘Good. You won’t be saying no tonight. Not to me – because I won’t allow it. You’re my boy for the night and you’ll do exactly what I want.’ I let go of his testicles and bat his cock from side to side with a cruel finger. ‘Springy,’ I comment. ‘Such a nice little toy for me.’

The intent look on his face suggests that he is waiting for me to wrap my hand around it, maybe give it a few pumps up and down. No way, boy. Not yet.

‘Turn around,’ I order. ‘Let me have a look at your arse, since you seem so preoccupied with mine.’

Since Lloyd took over the hotel management, he’s been availing himself of that free gym membership like a man with an addiction to kettlebells. His backside is a piece of sculpture, firm and tight and round and biteable as an apple.

It seems a shame to harm it. But harm it I must.

I smack one rubber-gloved hand down on his right cheek, such a lovely sound. He doesn’t flinch, doesn’t even lose control of a breath.

‘Thank you, ma’am,’ he says flirtatiously, wiggling his hips. ‘Do you want me to bend over too?’

‘No. I want you to crawl over to where those cuffs are hanging. Get on your hands and knees. Now.’

I send my obedient serf on his way with a polished toe to his rear, stalking him and swishing the crop, making it land in light little pats on his skin.

‘On your feet.’ I encourage him with a slightly harder stroke.

‘Are you really going to beat me with that thing?’ he asks, appealing to my mercy. ‘I mean, really hard?’

‘Of course I am. You were unforgivably insolent just now. I have to punish you for it.’

‘Oh God.’ He is rueful but compliant, holding up his wrists for me to cuff.

‘Regretting this? I’m not failing it, if that’s what you were hoping. Not a chance. I mean to pass this test with flying colours.’

I click the cuffs shut, then pull on the length of chain that acts as a pulley, lifting his arms so that they are way over his head. It’s hard work, because I’m lighter than him and have to rely on his co-operation, but he helps me tighten it until he’s on tiptoes. He did this to me once and my arms were sore for two days. Revenge is sweet.

Except it isn’t. Sweet is the wrong word. Grimly satisfying on only one of many levels. Aside from that, I feel sorry for him. He looks so helpless I want to rescue him.

‘You can just concede this and we can go home,’ I whisper to him.

‘No,’ he says. ‘I’m going to make you hurt me.’

‘You’re insane.’

‘Well, you can always concede this and we can go home.’

‘I’m not letting you win!’

‘Right. Best get to it then, ma’am. And make me scream.’

I pick up the flogger, a gentler instrument, and study its plaited strands. He is evil. He knows there’s a very good chance I won’t be able to hurt him.

I swoosh it against his backside.

‘That tickles,’ he says laconically.

I ply it harder. God, he looks good in bondage. That element of the punishment is pleasing me a great deal. His body, stretched and supplicating, cries out to be touched. But his voice doesn’t cry out at all.

I keep going, doggedly, trying to change the colour of his pale bottom and not getting very far.

‘I’m sorry, ma’am,’ he says, ‘but have you started yet?’

‘Argh!’ My frustration puts weight behind my stroke, and the next one hits the spot, rewarding me with a grunt.

Gradually, his skin flushes pink, but it takes a lot of flogging by me and gritted teeth by him to get to that point.

‘I’m going to use the crop now,’ I tell him, worried I might wear out my arm.

‘OK, but you have to do it hard,’ he says.

‘Do you think you could stop topping from the bottom for a few moments?’

‘I’m sorry, but it’s important. This won’t work if you don’t really lay it on. I want you to make me beg you to stop.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I want to see what you’ll do. I kind of need to see what you’ll do, actually.’

‘You should have a safe word, like I do when it’s the other way round.’

‘No, I don’t want a safe word. I want you to carry on. If you want to win this, you have to carry on.’

‘You’re asking too much of me.’

‘Fine. Then concede it.’

‘No.’

‘Hurt me then. Whip me till I cry.’

‘For fuck’s sake, Lloyd.’

‘Just do it.’

Sheer frustration makes me lay the first stroke much harder than I intended.

‘Ohhhh.’ He howls and pants, pulling at the cuffs.

‘Shit, I’m sorry! Oh, that looks sore.’

A welt rises, long and red and solemn. I touch it with my fingertips. It’s so hot. But he does this to me, so why should I feel guilty? Besides, it looks good. It suits him. I make up my mind to give him twenty. I can take twenty myself. More on a good day, so it shouldn’t be a problem for Lloyd. But then, I like a bit of pain. He doesn’t.

‘It’s OK,’ he puffs. ‘Go on. More.’

He manages to stay silent for the second and third, but his shoulder blades are so tense that I’m the one wincing. His flesh flattens under the whip then bounces back. It’s interesting to watch. I’ve seen video footage of him whipping me before, but it’s different when the handiwork is your own. I find myself taking pride in my work, wanting to keep the strokes even and symmetrical.

At the same time, I want to look at his face. I need an angle that will show me both. I find a stance that allows me to watch his head in profile while still examining the welts that rise on his backside. With each stroke he throws back his neck and I see the curving line, interrupted by his Adam’s apple, ending in a jumble of facial features contorted with pain. He starts to make noises around the fifth stroke, weird grunts and exhalations. I almost give up. Is this what I am like when he does this to me? And, if so, how can he carry on?

But he knows I want him to.

I know no such thing.

The sixth stroke is much gentler. I don’t even mean to hold back, but I definitely do. It’s cheating, I know, but I repeat this technique with the seventh. It doesn’t even leave a mark.

‘No,’ he says. ‘They don’t count. Not hard enough. Count them again.’

‘You’re telling me what to do.’

‘These are my rules, Sophie. Count them again or this is a fail.’

‘But you aren’t enjoying it. I’m finding it a bit upsetting, actually.’

‘Nobody’s forcing you to do it.’

‘Fine.’ I throw down the crop. ‘You win. One fail. I can’t do this to you.’

He looks round at me, almost losing balance and falling sideways. ‘Why can’t you?’ he asks. He is smiling through the sweat, pleased with himself at finding a challenge that has defeated me.

‘I’m not a sadist, and you’re not a masochist. I can’t make it any different. I’m not going to hurt you unless you’re going to enjoy it. It’s not fair to ask me to.’

‘I never said I was going to play fair.’

‘I can’t imagine why I expected you to, to be honest. What a mug.’

‘So the pain thing is out of the window. But that doesn’t mean this scene is over, does it? If you want to order me about a bit, feel free. There’s a lot more to domination than whacking seven bells out of your sub’s bottom, after all.’

‘Yeah.’ I think of the strap-on. My lips quirk upwards. ‘You’re right. I still have some plans for you.’

‘There, you see. You can still swerve another fail.’ He rattles the chains with his straining cuffs. ‘I might need to get out of these, though. Feel like my arms are about to drop off.’

‘You give a lot of orders, don’t you?’

Suddenly, on a whim, I pick the crop back up and give him one heartfelt final swipe, scoring a beautiful deep crimson line across all the others.

He shouts out in stunned alarm. ‘Oi!’

‘Just making sure you remember who’s running this scene, boy.’

I put my rubber-gloved hand on his bottom. The heat pulses against my bare fingertips and I enjoy running them over the slight ridges the crop has raised. I take the crop and slide it between his trembling thighs. The flat leather end nudges his balls; I push them to and fro while the handle slides over his perineum.

Now the noises he makes are different, low sighs and Os of pleasure. ‘Ahhh, nice,’ he manages to vocalise.

I angle the handle upwards so it parts the cheeks of his bottom, and push it up into the cleft. I grind it round and round, closer in. I wish I could see his face now. I pull the rest of the instrument through his thighs and press the handle up against his arsehole.

‘Oh God,’ he says harshly, urgently. ‘What are you doing, Soph?’

‘What do you think I’m doing?’ I twist the handle against that helpless bud.

‘Lube? Maybe? If you’re … you know. If that’s what you want to do to me.’

I laugh a cruel domme-ish laugh. ‘Relax. I’m not going to bugger you. Not yet.’

I put the crop away and move around to face him. He looks strained and flushed, his normally pale face florid and shiny. His eyes are bulbous and staring.

‘Sophie, please,’ he whispers.

I see his cock standing erect, reaching all the way up to his navel. ‘You want something?’ My hand hovers around it, never quite touching it.

‘Oh yes, touch it.’

‘I think you’ve forgotten the formalities, haven’t you?’ I wave my fingers, trying to achieve a fanning effect that he will feel.

‘Please, ma’am, please touch my cock.’

‘I don’t think you deserve it.’

I graze the swollen head, barely, with my fingernails. He convulses, shuddering out a long sigh.

‘Like that, you mean?’

‘Harder, please, ma’am, grab it, squeeze it, please.’

I drop to my knees and breathe on it.

‘Oh God, you bitch!’

‘That’s no way to talk to your mistress.’ I reach around and smack his arse, then pour more hot breath on his shaft and his tight, hard balls.

‘I’m sorry, ma’am! I hate being teased. I hate not being in control. Oh God, please suck it.’

He undermines his plea by trying to twist away from me, presenting me with a pale flank instead. I smack him again and hold him by the hips, enjoying the latent power held captive under my palms.

With the very tippy-tip of my tongue I draw a slow upward line from his root to his head. I make it last. He tries to throw me off course, thrusting into my face, but he can’t get the purchase he needs to succeed.

I laugh as I lick, pinching into his hips, wriggling my rubber-cased arse where he can’t fail to see it. I give a taunting little flourish of tongue when I reach his frenulum and then pop off and back right away, smiling at the pained lines on his forehead.

‘Oh Christ, Sophie, please …’

‘Open your eyes. I’ve got something to show you.’

Once his gaze is satisfactorily level, I turn around and bend over, feeling my bum cheeks strain against the constricting rubber until I worry it might split. But it doesn’t and I spread them as wide as I can and shake them, then put my hands flat against them, pressing my fingertips in to the taut shiny-black second skin, peering up at him from between my legs.

‘Come over here. Let me out of this,’ he says.

‘You still haven’t got that quite right, have you?’

I straighten up and jump around to face him. I pull up a chair, some kind of bondage device with cuffs on the arms and legs, but I ignore those, sit myself down and sprawl with my legs over the sides.

‘And guess what?’ I reach down to my crotch. Velcro tears asunder, revealing my sex. ‘Easy access! Good, eh?’

‘Oh God.’ He stumbles forwards when I put my hand inside the dark, furtive opening and start to rub.

‘Ooh, juicy. I must have enjoyed whipping you more than I realised. Actually, it’s probably the rubber. So tight and hot, holding me in, clinging.’ I lift my fingers to my mouth and suck them.

He looks as if he might faint, all that colour draining away. The stiff baton obscuring his lower abdomen must be getting uncomfortable now.

But that’s not my problem, is it?

‘Think I’ll pick myself a vibrator,’ I say casually, strolling up to the toy cupboard to select a nice number with a clitoral stimulator. ‘This’ll do.’

I resume my legs akimbo posture, switch on the vibe and push it slowly and cleanly up inside my cunt, holding Lloyd’s eyes every second of the way.

‘Can you see it going in? Do you wish that was your cock?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ he whispers, transfixed.

‘Well, it isn’t going to be. Not tonight. Your cock gets nothing tonight. It’s spoilt and overindulged. It needs to learn to take turns.’

His lips are turned down and he’s breathing heavily. He looks half crushed, half homicidal. I’m quite relieved that the cuffs are so effective.

The vibe slides in to the hilt and the clit buzzer begins its work. I push and thrust with it, grinding my hips in the chair, throwing back my head and losing myself in the sensation. Every now and again, I peek over to look at Lloyd.

‘Open your eyes! You have to watch this!’

‘I can’t … I’m so hard … please …’

‘You concede then?’

He wrenches up his eyelids. ‘No I fucking well don’t.’

‘Watch then.’

I work myself well and thoroughly, making sure my G-spot gets plenty of attention, letting the vibrations pulse gently through my swelling clit. I get close, and then I pull the thing out, wanting more of Lloyd’s desperation and frustration before I come.

‘I preferred when you were whacking me!’ he yelps when I plunge the vibrator back in. ‘This is way more cruel.’

‘So sorry.’ But the murmur is a reflex, not sincere, because I am too focused now on the tide lapping slowly forwards once more, creeping up, getting ready.

When I come, I try not to make a sound but just let the breath ebb from my body, controlled, unhurried. Although my eyelids flutter, I can still see most of what Lloyd is doing and it intensifies my pleasure to know that he is in his predicament, restrained and erect and raring to fuck me.

‘I think,’ I say, sounding slightly drunk as I try to swing my legs back over the chair arms, ‘it’s time for your treat now. I’m gonna uncuff you, but don’t you even think about touching me, OK?’

‘Hard to make that promise, Soph.’

‘I know. That’s why I’m asking you to make it.’

‘All right.’

I start to unbuckle the straps of leather encircling his wrists. They are pink and a little sore looking. He lowers his arms stiffly. ‘I want you to go over to that piece of furniture I got out earlier and bend over it.’

‘What?’ He puts his head to one side, examining me as if aiming to look into my mind. ‘What’s the plan, ma’am?’

‘You’ll see, boy. Now do it.’ I let my palm ring out on that still-welted backside.

He growls, then realises that submissives are not meant to growl and lunge at their mistresses, shrugs and slopes over to the bench.

‘Get that behind nice and high,’ I command as he positions himself. I tie his wrists again, and his ankles. Don’t want any misdirected kicks, not when I do what I’m planning to do. ‘Just keep still while I go and get my equipment.’

‘What equipment?’

‘Aha. Wait and see. Don’t move.’

‘I can’t bloody well move anyway. You’re going to whip me again, aren’t you? Oh my God, you’re going to get a dildo and …’

Now he’s on the right track. But I don’t want to ruin the surprise, so I simply shush him and grab the harness from the cupboard.

He must be able to hear it jingle and clink while I attach it to my pelvis. The cock part of it draws its centre of gravity down, the weight is a little disconcerting. What would it actually be like to have a cock, I find myself wondering. Does it get in the way of stuff all the time?

‘Have you guessed what it is yet?’ I tease, practising a few different poses, grabbing hold of the dildo part and pointing it towards his distant pink bottom.

‘Something with metal … a harness of some kind.’

‘Now I just need to choose the right lube … maybe some of this tingle gel, eh?’

‘Oh, Sophie!’ He says my name with such reverence. ‘I never dreamed you’d go this far. Are you really going to …?’

‘Fuck your arse, darling? Yes, I am.’

‘Oh sweet Jesus.’

‘You drove me to it. All your goading at me to concede. All your smugness about how sure you were I’d fail. This counts for several successes at once, I feel.’

‘I’ll be the judge of that. You haven’t done it yet.’

‘You haven’t done this before then?’

There’s a pause.

‘Actually, yes,’ he admits.

‘With a girl? Or a boy?’

‘Boy. Experiment.’

‘Good experiment? Or not?’

‘Pretty good, actually.’

‘Definitely the tingle gel then.’ I sigh heavily. ‘I was all excited about taking your virginity. That’s one thing I’ve still never done.’

‘Noted.’

‘I’m going to stop telling you things. I’ve never been pleasured in a sheik’s harem by eight naked oiled male models either. Is that noted too?’

‘No, because I think you’re lying.’

I’m close to him now. He needs to start feeling the seriousness of his position and he needs to start feeling it now.

I keep adjusting the harness as I walk, not sure how it’s meant to sit. Like this? Like that? I pull it as tight as I can, the fake cock bowing out in front of me.

I put my hand on his bottom and he flinches. I know his sphincter has tightened.

‘Dear sweet Lloyd. How do you like it? Hard and fast, or slow and sweet? How do you like your arse fucked?’

‘I … can’t remember.’ His teeth are gritted.

I squirt some lube on the exposed part of my fingers and slot them between his cheeks until I feel that wrinkled texture amid the softness. Tight, squeezed shut. Can I do this? Will I tear him?

I get it nice and slick and slidey then I push it forwards a tiny bit. I’m as tense as he is, every muscle of my face pulled into a grimace.

He breathes in short puffs. I know he’s making an effort to remember what he always tells me during anal sex. Bear down, push back, relax.

It takes just a moment of screwing my finger left and right and I’m in. How peculiar it feels to press against the narrow walls of his passage, so hot and so tender.

He makes an incoherent noise, and I remember I need to be domming it up big style, talking him through this.

‘You’ve got a finger up your arse, boy – how does that feel?’

‘Uh, quite nice, ma’am.’

‘Does it? Because you’re going to have more than a finger soon enough. How’s the tingle gel?’

‘Tingly.’

He illustrates this with a wiggle of his arse and a tightening of the muscles, closing around my finger like a trap. Where’s the prostate? Is it near here or further up? My strap-on and I will investigate its location.

‘Are you ready?’ I pull out my finger, watching the aperture close up again like one of those doors in space operas with multiple triangular blades that meet and seal up the exit.

‘As I’ll ever be,’ he says with some effort.

‘Right.’

I stand there, taking deep breaths. I’m more nervous than he is. Oh for fuck’s sake, I should just get on with it.

‘If you want to concede …’

I attach a limpet hand to one of his hips, press the dildo between his cheeks, find the target.