Struck By Lightning: Slow Satisfaction Part 17

"Because you know me well." His grin widened. "At least it might not be today."

"What's the task?"

"I'll explain it shortly. First, I do love putting you in bondage."

I followed him to the fireplace, where a coil of blue rope sat on the mantelpiece. An elegantly curved sculpture hung from the ceiling, reminding me of a yoke for a pair of horses.

I soon realized it was a yoke for me. It settled onto my shoulders and he roped my wrists to the ends of it. "And here I thought it was a piece of art."

"It is a piece of art, but a functional one. The winch is for lifting sculptures. It also happens to be useful for lifting people, in certain circ.u.mstances. Now bend your knees," he said, encouraging me to squat partway down. I felt like a bodybuilder partway through a lift. He adjusted the chains that the yoke hung from so that they were taut with me in that position, my a.s.s sticking out in back. "Very good."

He walked around me in a circle, admiring the view.

"No blindfold this time?" I asked.

"Not this time," he said. "And no gag, either. I think I want you to have full use of your eyes and mouth for this. There is one more thing I am going to use to restrain you, though."

"What?" I imagined something with leather and buckles.

"I'll show you. It's a very simple thing." He moved beyond where I could see and then came back holding an egg.

"Where is that going to go?" I couldn't imagine he was going to put it inside me, but what else could it be for?

"It goes right between your knees," he said, and leaned over to place it between my two bent legs. He put it just above my knees, where the fleshy part of my thighs began. "So, here is your task. Don't break the egg."

"Don't break it?"

"If it breaks, you get a c.l.i.t-flogging. If it doesn't break, you get rewarded by pleasure," he reminded me as he moved out of my sight to somewhere behind me.

"Huh. Sounds simple enough..." I couldn't turn my neck enough to see him. "What will you be doing in the meantime?"

"I'll be switching you."

"I thought switching meant we traded places."

He chuckled. "I mean switching as in birching. Although this is willow." He plucked one of the long, slender branches from the tall vase and showed it to me, before retreating behind me again.

"Oh." Birching was something like caning, if my half-remembered knowledge of Victoriana was correct. "So... I guess it's not all pleasure, then?" My voice came out a giddy squeak.

He sounded just as gleeful. "I said that would be after the task. I never said whether the task would be painful or not, did I?"

"You should have been a lawyer."

"I like promises better than contracts," he said, running his hand over my bare bottom. "Negotiation is fun. Contracts are dull."

"If you say so."

"Hush now. Here comes the first one." He stepped back and I heard the sound of something swis.h.i.+ng in the air. The sound made me startle, but it was just a test: nothing happened. "Remember, don't drop the egg, or crush it."

"Oh f.u.c.k," I said, and I meant it.

The first blow with the switch felt like a slice of fire across my a.s.s, a thin line of burning, a little bit like the riding crop except not as hard. It didn't feel like an impact so much as a sudden blossom of agony across my b.u.t.tocks. I clenched my fists around the ends of the yoke and realized it was shaped perfectly for that. Kinky handlebars. I wondered if James had made them himself or if you could buy them on the Internet.

My wonderings were interrupted by the next stripe across a fresh part of my skin, and I shook a little, groaning to absorb the pain while fighting not to squeeze my thighs together and crush the egg.

Oh, that egg. It became the center of all my thoughts as he laid stripe after stripe onto me, down the backs of my thighs and across my b.u.t.t cheeks, never hurrying, savoring my plight. I tried to convince myself that he'd hardboiled it. Surely he wouldn't risk the finish on the fancy parquet wood floor. But could I risk it? I couldn't.

And I couldn't do anything less than my best for him. "Ow ow ow! That's really starting to hurt!" I cried, around what must have been the twentieth one. I had lost track of how many I'd taken a long time ago.

"Back up," he suggested gently.

"Back up?"

"Very carefully, take teensy steps backward toward me," he said. "Carefully. There you go. Stop if you feel like you're going to drop the egg."

I shuffled backward a few inches, then a few inches more, while the winch pulled at the chains attached to the yoke. The result was I was bent forward more, my a.s.s even more prominently thrust toward him, my toes pointed inward as I kept my grip on the floor.

"You can't see it," he said, "but your p.u.s.s.y lips are protruding now."

"Oh f.u.c.k," I said, knowing full well that meant that tender area would be his next target for the switch. I had kept up shaving between my legs while we'd been apart, so there was not even hair to protect from the evil implement.

He was merciless now, not pausing between stripes, laying it on five, six, seven, eight times until I was screaming, and then another and another until I lost my footing. I curled instinctively, pulling my feet up, and I swung, hanging from the bar, forward and then back again. He caught me with a hand on my rump before I could go too far, then fondled me, working two fingers inside my wet core.

His voice was warm and sweet in my ear. "You did very well."

"Did I?" My legs trembled a little at the way his fingers were moving inside me.

"So far." With that he gave my G-spot a sudden tweak and I gasped and spasmed...

And crushed the egg. The sound of the sh.e.l.l cracking and then the wet plop on the floor was unmistakable. "Oh f.u.c.k f.u.c.k f.u.c.k."

"Tsk tsk tsk. We're not to the f.u.c.king part yet," he said with a gentle laugh. "I guess it's c.l.i.t-flogging time after all."

He released me from the yoke and led me to one of the covered pieces of furniture, sliding the drape off to reveal a seductively curved... chair? Divan? Imagine if an incredibly high-end furniture maker had designed a luxury gynecologist's table. He folded the sheet and placed it where I would be lying back, and then helped me up onto it. I was reminded of the bucket seat in his car, curved to my body. "Now. Hold your knees with your hands. Keep yourself spread for me."

He leaned down to plant a tender kiss right on my c.l.i.t, which throbbed wildly in response. I was so aroused.

I watched him saunter across the room to open a cabinet set in the wall. I couldn't see what else was in it, but when he closed the door again I saw he had a flogger with many short tails, only six or seven inches long, in his hand. "I bought this for you, after seeing how you responded to one like it in London."

He came and kissed me on the mouth first, another long melding of our lips and tongues until I was panting, and then he went to stand at my feet. He dragged the tails slowly upward, the friction across my c.l.i.t making my legs shake.

"That aroused already? My, my, someone really does love challenges."

"Someone really does love you," I confessed.

"Say that again when you're not high on endorphins." He caressed the insides of my thighs with his fingertips.

"Maybe I'll say it when I come."

"Maybe you will." With that he began to flog my thighs lightly, alternating from one to the other, gradually working his way toward the middle. When at last he reached my p.u.s.s.y with the whap-whap-whap of the tails, the blows were still teasingly light, and I gasped and rocked my hips with each blow. Then he returned to beating my thighs, this time with harder strokes, again working his way to the center, where each time the flogger landed on my c.l.i.t I cried out.

But he could strike even more sharply than that, this time snapping the flogger like a towel, leaving a trail of stinging welts down my already red thighs, closer and closer to my c.l.i.t. He slowed as he neared it, spending a long time working my swollen lips with blow after blow, with only a stray tail catching my c.l.i.t from time to time. I began to cry out on every strike then, my pitch rising as I realized how close I was.

And then quite suddenly the flogger was landing right there, at the place where my pleasure centered, at the place where the electricity crackled. I didn't even realize at first that he wasn't hitting me hard there: he didn't have to. I was coming from a b.u.t.terfly-light stroke now, screaming in ecstasy.

I hadn't quite finished, hadn't quite ridden the o.r.g.a.s.m all the way to the end when he was commanding me, "Off the table, bend over, hands on the edge, spread your legs."

I hurried to get into position, and then he was filling me, that part of him I'd craved for so long, bare and perfect inside me. I clenched around him, still spasming from the first o.r.g.a.s.m, when he began to flog me again, reaching around me with the whip to beat my c.l.i.t hard now, f.u.c.king me at the same time. When I began to come again, he laid it on even harder and faster, and that only made the o.r.g.a.s.m more intense, and my screams louder.

Then I heard the flogger hit the floor, and his hand cupped me from behind, ma.s.saging my c.l.i.t through one more while he pushed himself into me with the speed and intention I recognized meant it was his turn to come.

He came with a bellow and kept going until his thrusts turned soft and slick. Then he pulled free and with the last of the stiffness he could maintain, rubbed it in the crack of my a.s.s, teasing there until he went completely soft.

We sank down onto the wooden floor and he cradled me, leaning himself against the side of the exam table. "You beautiful, fantastic, incredible angel," he said.

I didn't think I could muster words that big yet. "You're not so bad yourself, you know."

That made him laugh and he planted kisses wherever he could reach, my hair, the side of my face, my ear. "And now the drawback of having such a big house. The bedroom is directly below us. Perhaps I should install a trapdoor that would drop us into the bed."

"While you're at it, how about a water slide that slides us into the shower?"

"Also an excellent idea. Unfortunately, right now, we'll have to get up and walk. In a few minutes."

"In a few minutes," I agreed, utterly sated, and gleefully content.

We eventually did get up, of course, and saw two of the ten bathrooms, one that was attached to the studio, and then the one attached to the master bedroom, which reminded me of the bathroom in the Charing Cross Hotel, only ten times bigger. The shower could have easily held five people.

It was just the two of us, though.

And then we got into bed, but only to cuddle, not to spend the night. It wasn't even nine o'clock yet. I was amazed. I was certain he had been flogging and torturing me all night long.

The bed was huge and I couldn't even guess what sheets that soft were made of. Silk? Baby chinchilla down? "All right," I said. "Your turn. What secret will you tell me tonight?"

Ten.

Thinking It Must Be Love What do you want to know?" James had slipped on midnight blue satin pajamas and I nestled in the crook of his arm, both of us looking up at the mural painted on the ceiling. Soft music played in the background from speakers I could not see. Cellos.

"Lucinda. Tell me about her." I draped my arm across his chest. "Stefan seems to think she was no good for you. Chandra, too."

"When did you talk to Chandra about Lucinda?" He sounded curious but not upset.

"I didn't. You talked to her where I could overhear."

"Did I? I must have been careless."

"It was at the doctor's office that time. We did have a... sort of intense time. Maybe that made you less cautious than usual."

"So we did. And it's you, Karina, that makes me want to throw caution to the wind."

"Me? What is it about me?"

"I told you that you're special." He kissed my temple. "Now about Lucinda. I suppose she should have been a cautionary tale, too. We met at a fetish night."

"Fetish night?"

"At a nightclub. A night where everyone wears their leather and rubber and the kinky people can meet one another."

"What were you doing at a place like that?"

"Slumming, of course." He chuckled self-deprecatingly. "By far the best thing about no one knowing what Lord Lightning looks like is that I can move freely in a place like that. Not to mention the grocery store-"

"I can't picture you in the grocery store. You don't buy your own groceries."

"I don't employ a chef except for special occasions. I don't have a butler or a live-in maid. Stefan lives in the so-called 'maid's room' downstairs. I do not send Stefan to the grocery store."

"I still can't picture you shopping for produce."

"I like the farmer's market when it's the season, actually. But are my domestic habits what you want to know about?"

"No! Well, yes, but you were telling me about Lucinda."

"She walked into this place looking like a Swedish supermodel, and set every man drooling. I watched man after man strike out. I bided my time, waiting for her to come to me. She eventually did."

"How did you know she would come to you?"

"I didn't. But I knew if I was going to have any chance at all, she would have to come to me and not the other way around. There were only three things that could have kept us from getting together." He held up his hand, counting off on his fingers. "One, she was a lesbian. Two, she met someone before me who interested her more than me. Three, I met someone before her who interested me more than her. Well, no one there interested me more than her, and she wasn't a lesbian. So it was mostly a matter of hoping someone else didn't rival me for her attention."

"And no one did?"

He chuckled. "No."

"Oh, come on. There could have been another man as charismatic and handsome as an internationally known rock star there."

"But there wasn't. She finally approached me to ask what I was drinking. I told her and said if she wanted the honor of getting me a drink, she would have to do it on her knees. She knee-walked to the bar and back."

"Knee-walked?"

"There's a way to do it without looking ridiculous. It's a martial arts technique, from kendo. That got my attention of course. She stayed on her knees at my feet while I sipped the drink she had brought. Then I said I had one simple test that any play partner of mine had to pa.s.s. She had to answer one question."

"What was the question?"