Under the Lash Page 8

  When he again took possession of her privates, delving deep between those obscenely exposed folds, he found exactly what he had been looking for: she was as wet now as she had always been when he finished even the most stringent disciplinary session. In fact, the quirt had left her positively dripping, and she was much akin to that right now. It brought a smile to his face, one that looked to the panting, moaning, thoroughly out of control Cassie to be one of purely evil intent, so much so that she did her level best to avoid his hand, which only garnered her two sharp swats to her tender inner thighs to correct her naughty avoidance behavior.

  This time, though, unlike the past few days, when he leaned down to capture some of her nectar, he didn’t just do it quickly. Instead he seemed to be testing her, gently inserting his big finger just slightly past her opening and watching her intently in the mirror for any signs of discomfort.

  But there was none. In fact, it was the exact opposite. His first tentative invasion had her issuing a long, low moan that encouraged him to press himself even further inside her. Her breaths were coming in fast, hard pants.

  Anjel halted his advance immediately. “Am I hurting you?”

  If she had thought about it quickly enough, Cassie should have said, “Yes, yes, I’m in terrible pain,” in order to discourage him from any further exploration there. But she was – basically – a truthful person, and her first response came out before she had a chance to reconsider it. “Nooooooooo.”

  It was when she heard his soft, almost indulgent chuckle from behind her that she realized she should have been much more careful in choosing her reply. But it was too late now. To say nothing of the fact that she had a feeling that lying to him was not a very good idea. She wasn’t sure how he’d find out that she was lying about something like that, but she figured he’d find a way and make her pay for having done so by striping her bottom something fierce.

  Anjel was surprised to find himself with a lovely dilemma on his hands – quite literally. He couldn’t decide whether he should bring her to a glorious orgasm right there, in front of the mirror where they could both watch, or whether, having discovered that she was recovered, he should bring her to his comfortable bed and do to her what he had wanted to do for some time.

  And the wanting won out. Cassie soon found herself being carried across the small room, and set down with her bottom at the very edge of the bed, her legs well spread, but pillows placed beneath them for her comfort. Then he did something that had her curiosity peaked: he knelt in front of her, as if he was bowing before her, or was going to propose, and both, of course, were preposterous ideas.

  But when he leaned forward to latch those full, warm lips over her most tender spot, she thought the very idea of what he was actually doing to her to be quite preposterous, too, and more than a little shameful, so much so that she began to try to scoot out from under his mouth, only to be immediately flipped over and swatted with the nearest thing he found, which happened to be his solid oak hairbrush. It wasn’t all that big, but in his capable hand it packed quite a wallop, if her wails were anything to judge by.

  “How many times do I have to tell you that once I put you into a position, Miss Cassie, you are to stay in that position until you are given permission to move?” he asked, and she had learned that he expected and answer, too.

  “I– I’m s–sorry, Sir!” she moaned, her bottom dancing violently as far back and forth as his hold on her allowed, which wasn’t much. Certainly not enough to give her any relief from the smacking of that strict implement down on flesh that was always in a constant state of real discomfort – especially since the last time he had chastised her he had used that awful quirt, and she could feel how the oval head of that brush rained splotch after stinging splotch of fire down over the ridges that still remained from her first taste of the lash.

  “Sorry won’t keep you from getting your hide tanned just like you are now, young lady. Strict obedience is your only hope to avoid some of the spankings you’re receiving with alarming regularity. Am I making myself perfectly clear?”

  She had heard that expression recently – and she remembered exactly where with an agonized shout. Her stepfather had used exactly that phrase when she had interrupted him disciplining her mother in much the same way she was now being punished!

  Chapter Seven

  Fairly wailing now, from the mental anguish of what she’d just remembered as well as the physical agony of having her rear end seared by that brush, Cassie began to cry even more uncontrollably than she had before.

  At that, Anjel placed the brush back on his dresser, close at hand, then turned her back over and rearranged her legs, eagerly reclaiming his position on his knees before her. There was very little more that he enjoyed about making love to a woman than reveling in the true taste of her. Some women demurred and declined – for what reasons he would never understand. But Cassie had no choice in the matter, and he applied himself to the font of her pleasure with somewhat less than delicate greed.

  As much as she wanted to be able to simply stop responding to him, and as hard as she had tried to do just that, she could not achieve her goal. Even in the deep despair she was feeling right, he always managed to push past her resistance to an even greater height than he had ever brought her to before. Somehow he knew her and her responses to him frighteningly well, and there was absolutely no way that Cassie could ignore his actions. Those firm, soft lips captured the heart of her womanhood and held it there, drenched in his heat and lovingly laved over and over again by that broad, flat tongue of his.

  Or worse, even, flicked endlessly around and over that tasty morsel, as he adjusted his technique to the verbal and nonverbal cues he didn’t even think she realized she was betraying to him. At one point, he reached beneath her and squeezed a still hot to the touch cheek, making her arch herself even further into his mouth, trying futilely to avoid the sting of his painful touch and landing herself firmly against the fiery lash of his tongue.

  But when he simultaneously reached up to begin torturing her nipples, each in turn, and also slipped one big finger inside her, she completely lost her mind. There was no shame, there was no worry, there was nothing in her world but his dark head as it bent between her legs, driving her towards that raw release that she had begun craving as surely as she craved food to eat.

  And this time, one of the few times, he didn’t make her wait for it. He didn’t tease, he didn’t torture. He simply set himself to that goal and forced her over the edge, fucking her gently with his finger, squeezing and rolling each nipple painfully as he came to it, but mostly not allowing her one millisecond of respite from the strident attentions of his lips and tongue.

  And when she came, it was with a full–throated, all out scream fit to shake the very timbers that kept them afloat. Anjel managed to extricate himself from her, however reluctantly, wearing a grin so broad it hurt his face as he stood and curled his arms under her thighs, pulling her towards him and setting himself at her entrance and slowly entered her, keeping his hold on her thighs lest she should take it into her head to try to move away.

  Cassie, however, was well beyond that. She knew, somewhere, somehow, outside of the haze that had descended within her own mind that she should have been protesting what he was doing to her, but she couldn’t find the will to do it. Especially since – unlike the previous instance – every bit of his advance within her stretched her wide in an unbearably pleasant manner that had her blushing almost as fiercely as she had when he had first taken her into his mouth.

  All she could seem to do was to groan and mewl as he pressed himself within her, forcing her to accept his presence within her body, only this time she was startled to find that she wanted more rather than less of him. She wanted to clasp him to her rather than push him away, and when he lodged himself fully within her to the hilt, then pumped forward just slightly to assure himself of it, she emitted a long, low groan that she would have wished had come from anyone’s lips but her own for it
s raw, guttural tone.

  At one point, she even lost her head enough that she tried to sit up, tried to bring him down to her so that she could clasp her arms around him, but he pushed her back down with two sharp swats to her breasts.

  “No, Cassie. You are not in control here. I want to take you like this, so that I can watch you closely as I do so.”

  And he did. He drank in every movement she made, every frustrated cry she gave as he began to pump in and out of her, gently at first and then, by the end, quite forcefully, plunging himself again and again into that sweet heart of her, elated to no end to have her climax again, clenching herself around him even more tightly than she already – naturally – was, until her contractions drove him to lose his own pinnacle on the world, and he ground himself into her as he spent himself, figuratively and literally.

  Afterwards, he gathered her to him, disturbed to realize that she was sobbing again, inconsolably, as she had several times before. No threats of punishment nor even gentle coaxing would get her to confide in him just what it was that caused her such abject sorrow, and he was becoming resigned to merely holding her through it until she fell asleep, but it was not a solution he favored.

  Every time he took her; every time he imposed his sexual desires onto her and then refused to allow her own to be hidden safely away from him, but most especially every time he used pain to bring her the utmost in pleasure, all Cassie could think about was how she had become so much like her mother, and the thought made her impossibly sad, both because she didn’t want to be like this – like her – in that, and because, despite how they had parted, she missed her mother terribly.

  And she didn’t think she could expect a pirate to understand any of that, so she kept her secrets locked well away from him, still praying – vowing – that she would find some method of escaping him and all of the depravities he had visited upon her.

  His duties did take him out of the cabin regularly, which was important to her because she spent that time as close to happy as she could get in this situation, behind a locked door, reading very quickly through the good sized library of books she’d discovered in a built in bookcase that was cleverly hidden behind a wall tapestry.

  She became so engrossed in one of his books, curled up in the only comfortable chair in the room – the big overstuffed Captain sized one that fairly swallowed her up when she sat in it by herself and smelled disturbingly of his bay rum aftershave – that she didn’t hear the key in the lock nor his steps to her side until he cleared his throat loudly and she nearly threw the book at him in what she was sure was going to be a self defense maneuver.

  “Oh my word, you startled me,” she said upon realizing that it was him.

  Anjel reached down to pick up the book. “Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson.”

  “Yes. An interesting literary choice for a pirate, I must say,” she ventured sarcastically.

  “I appreciate irony,” he replied almost off hand. “You read?” he asked, somewhat incredulously and belatedly.

  “Yes, Sir.”

  As if he didn’t quite believe her, he opened the book and handed it to her. “Read that.”

  She read the passage that he had pointed to, flawlessly, although allowing a hint of sarcasm in her voice. Cassie continued to look into his eyes after she passed the book back to him. He was in a strange, unpredictable mood, questioning her about her ability to read for no apparent reason, as if he were suddenly more suspicious of her than he had been since he’d brought her on board.

  And, it turned out, with good reason.

  She hadn’t simply awakened the second day of her captivity here and settled into reading like a lump. At first, she had spent every second that he wasn’t with her scouring the place for a way out – any way out – a secret passage or a porthole – anything. She did find several portholes along the top of the cabin just below the room that let in light, but they were all several feet taller than she was and she had no hope of opening them even once she’d exhausted herself dragging his huge chair over beneath it to boost her up so that she could reach them. She simply didn’t have the strength. They seemed to be sealed shut, and there was no moving them without assistance, which she heartily doubted anyone aboard would grant her. There was no other means of escape apparently. Just him and his blasted key, with which he locked her in each time he left the room.

  Now she was stuck on the idea that she needed to find some way to relieve him of that key – once they were in a port somewhere, of course, and the ship had presumably become largely emptied by the crew who were off on shore leave, or whatever the correct nautical term was for going into town and getting stinking drunk. That had been the entirety of her experience with sailors in the short time that she had spent on San Miguel.

  But she had decided, during the course of the past few days, that she wanted to tell him as little about herself as possible, especially since the person she had been when she set foot on this ship was no longer who she was at all. Cassandra Solange Constance Mary Winthrop–Sutton, the daughter of the ninth Earl of Sutton, had been long since buried under the weight of her own mortification. There was virtually no way for her to go back to the life she had led – even on the Duque’s remote island.

  Once she stepped off this ship again – and she was bound and determined to do that – she would become, out of necessity, someone else. She wasn’t exactly sure yet just who, but she’d work that out when the opportunity presented itself.

  “How did you learn to read?”

  “I was taught, Sir.”

  “By whom?”

  Although she was doing her best to maintain her anonymity, she also tried to stick to the truth as much as possible, so as to have fewer lies to deal with. “Tutors, Sir.”

  Anjel grunted in reply as he ousted her from his seat, only to haul her back onto his lap. She was an enigma, this one, and he hated puzzles. Although she answered the questions he asked her about herself without hesitation, he had a strong sense that she was holding a lot back, and that, in and of itself, was very contrary to his own experience of women. Most of the females he’d had any kind of knowledge of were more likely to the ears off him and anyone else within shouting range, but not Cassie.

  She was almost eerily quiet and surprisingly self contained.

  And she read for pleasure. How interesting. He knew more highborn ladies than not who detested reading. Oh they had been educated, but they used only what they needed to get by. Their lives were filled with fashion, food, and flowers, it seemed, and not much else.

  “What did you think of it?” he asked, busily divesting her of the ruined shift and dress she donned every time he left.

  “What?”

  “The story.” He tugged down the top of the garments she had managed to fix only slightly one day, when she had begged him for a needle and thread to do just that. Now they were sewn together only in an obscenely small line down the middle that gave her only the slightest modicum of comfort at being at least somewhat covered while he was gone, although he almost always divested her of them as soon as he came into the room. But this time he only worked them down just enough to capture her elbows tightly against her body, so that she couldn’t move her arms, leaving those beautiful breasts of hers entirely open to his delectation.

  Cassandra snorted in a most unladylike fashion, causing him to divert his eyes from the way his hands were about to lay claim to her charms to meet her clear hazel eyes instead with an inquisitive look that prompted her to expound on her rude exclamation. “It was all right. Definitely not my experience of pirates, however, Sir.”

  Occasionally her inflection when she called him that was deliberately snide, but she had obviously forgotten where she was. The fingers that had been almost gently tugging at nipples that he was glad to see were nearly always peaked and eager for him, began to pinch them terribly hard while twisting at the same time.

  With those tender buds in his cruel hands and her arms bound to her sides by her
own dress, there was precious little she could do to alleviate the pain he was causing.

  Panting heavily at the discomfort he was causing, she tried to be proactive to get him to stop hurting her. “I’m sorry, Sir,” she offered, her voice breathy and thin.

  Those fingers closed even tighter, making tears stream down her cheeks as he watched her with an alarmingly detached air.

  “And what are you sorry about, little Cassie?”

  Sitting like this with him, splayed wide over his legs, the ruined dress revealing much more of her body than it concealed, so that she might as well have been completely naked, the chair more than four times her size easily and him at least two, and usually having been chastised in the most childish of ways multiple times before she ended up here did make her feel quite small, physically and emotionally.

  “My less than respectful tone, Sir.”

  No inflection, no sarcasm at all, and said with her eyes staunchly focused on his. “As well you should be. Fetch me my belt.”

  It was on the tip of her tongue to try to protest – or more smartly, try to talk him out of it somehow, but the look on his face did not welcome negotiation of any sort. Anjel rose and took one of the straight backed dining chairs and put it in the middle of the room. When she had handed him the thick leather instrument, he put his hand on the back of her head and guided her over the back of the chair.

  “Take a hold of the seat. You’re going to need it to remind you not to reach back,” he said, his tone frighteningly devoid of expression.

  The captain positioned himself behind her and to one side, fiddling with the belt until he got it into the shape he wanted it – buckle well in his palm and most of the rest of it wrapped around his big fist, but a good eight inches or so left with which to kiss her bottom.