Tedra crossed her arms over her chest, glaring at him. “As long as we’re at it, let’s not forget my trespassing this afternoon in your petitions hall.”
“I have not. For that you lost your dinner.”
Simple. Everything so simple and tied up in a neat package of barbaric logic for her edification. Well, the only enlightenment she was getting out of this was that she would be wise to get off this farden world at the first opportunity, to hell with trade and honor. But she was forgetting the mercenaries she needed, those very same warriors for whom she was fast developing a strong case of dislike, but who still seemed to be the only answer for the liberation of Kystran. She could close her eyes to honor with enough provocation, but not to all those Kystrani women-turned-slaves on Sha-Ka’ar who were suffering worse fates that she was right now.
“All right, barbarian,” Tedra said tonelessly. “If you’re done listing all my heinous crimes, break out your whips and do your worst.”
“You want to be beaten?”
“Yes,” she said, and meant it. But if you think everything is going to be the same between us when it’s over, think again.
She didn’t say it aloud, and not because a strange tightness was closing around her throat to make speaking difficult. She simply wouldn’t give him a reason to reconsider. No, right now she wanted him to hurt her. She wanted pain to remember, to make her fear him, to make her dead inside when he touched her, to make her hate him for real, because even now she didn’t. She should, after all those calmly stated “for thats,” but she didn’t. All she felt as the moment was . . . was a need to cry. Stars, what a horrible realization!
She missed his sigh during her contemplation, but she couldn’t miss his sitting up, since it brought his face mere inches from hers, his chest touching hers.
“Do you lay yourself across my upper legs, woman. You may rest your hands on the floor if you wish.”
“What?” she said, distracted by his warm breath against her lips. And then, “Oh, sure. Across the legs.”
She was still distracted, but managed to get up and reposition herself before she realized what she had done and reared back up, or tried to. A hand in the center of her back wasn’t letting her up, and both her hands pushing against the couch weren’t changing that. Her breasts just reached the edge of the couch, but her head didn’t quite reach the table she was facing.
There was nothing for it but to place her hands on the floor in the space between the two pieces of furniture. She certainly wasn’t distracted any longer. She was, in fact, thoroughly indignant.
“This won’t work, warrior. You’ll have to tie me down, or I won’t be responsible for what happens if I go nuts in reaction.”
“No.”
“No?” She twisted her head around until she could just see him. “I wasn’t kidding. I’ve got some techniques so deeply ingrained that they’re automatic reflexes. And you’ve given me your right side. I can do serious damage from here to your liver and kidneys, and if I manage to turn over, I could well kill you.”
“You really think this is possible, woman?”
He was humoring her, she could tell, which only made her madder. “Of course it’s possible. I can take a lot of pain, but I’ve never been put through anything extreme, so I can’t know how I will react. Don’t be so farden arrogant in thinking I’m not dangerous when pushed, warrior. With the right provocation, anyone can be dangerous, but I’ve been trained to be especially so. I don’t want to end up killing you by accident, no matter how much the thought tempts me right now.”
“I appreciate your candor as well as your concern for my safety, but you will not be tested beyond the limits of your endurance. What you will do is remain still and quiet, and accepting of what you asked for. Is that understood?”
“You’re making it an order that I have to control myself?” she asked incredulously.
“I see you do understand,” he said gravely.
But Tedra could have sworn he was fighting to contain his own control—not to laugh. She turned back to face the table. The cooling food spread out there should have disintegrated, her look was so hot and murderous.
“Get on with it, damn you,” she snarled low.
“As you wish.”
His open hand came down of her bare bottom with that last word, and stayed there to await her reaction. That he was awaiting her reaction should have stirred her suspicions, and if not that, then the measly strength behind that first smack should have. It didn’t. She was just annoyed that it didn’t hurt, when what she still wanted was the pain that was going to permit her to hate him.
“Give me a break,” she said slowly and with thick scorn, trying to prod him to anger. “A mosquito bite carries more impact than that love tap. I thought this was to be a punishment, not an insult.”
“Is this better?”
The next blow was a little harder, but still nothing to blink at. Again his hand remained on her backside until she commented.
“Will you stop with the kid stuff and get serious?”
“As you wish.”
The next wallop had quite a sting, but wasn’t even close to drawing forth the tears.
“Why don’t you try your right hand?” Tedra suggested dryly. “You’re obviously lacking strength in the left.”
“As you wish.”
She gritted her teeth now, expecting quite a difference, but all she got was another sting identical to the last. Now both his hands rested on her only slightly warmed bottom, again awaiting her reaction. That reaction was quick and furious, and with no hand pressing her down, she twisted half around to give it to him full blast.
“Just what the hell do you think you’re doing? I dust my bracs off harder than that!”
“When you have had enough, woman, you need only say so, since this was your idea, not mine.”
“What?!”
“You asked to be beaten,” he reminded her and could no longer keep from grinning. “I thought it a strange request, but since your punishment was not to begin until after I had finished eating, I decided to grant your wish.”
She screamed in pure rage and swung at him, only to miss completely from such an awkward position. “You miserable son of a diseased sa’abo! You knew what I thought! How dare you play on my assumptions like that?”
“When a woman has such silly assumptions, a warrior cannot resist teasing her with them.”
All those “as you wishes” took on a different meaning now, the literal meaning, and she screamed again, and swung again. This time her wrist was caught, and with total ease on his part, he rearranged her until she was positioned exactly as she had been before he decided to play games with her.
“Now you will be still, woman.”
He released her wrist to see if she would obey him. She did for the moment, though she wasn’t done frying him with her eyes.
He had the nerve to laugh at her anger. “Do you now begin to accept the truth that a warrior does not give actual pain to a woman? Such is not needed to teach proper behavior when there are ways to punish that cause little harm. I told you this when first we met. You should have remembered.”
“Just what do my terrible misdeeds warrant, then? A night on my knees facing a blank wall?”
“Again you make assumptions and mistake the seriousness of what you have done.”
His humor was gone now. His hand came to her cheek, and this time she saw the regret in his eyes. It frightened her as nothing else on this world had.
“No, kerima,” he said softly, sadly, using his pet name for her for the first time that night. “Make no more assumptions. Before the next rising, you will swear to obey all rules. You will not only beg for mercy, you will cry. But your tears will not be heard by a warrior bent on his duty. A warrior’s control forbids it.”
She shook her head, denying his words, knowing by that word “control” exactly what he meant to do to her. But it wouldn’t be like before. This time he wouldn’t stop until she did beg, di
d cry, did swear to anything he wanted, and he probably wouldn’t stop even then. What he was going to do was designed to humiliate, to smash her pride, to turn her into a malleable, obedient Kan-is-Tran woman. It wasn’t going to hurt her. No, it was just going to drive her crazy.
Chapter Twenty-six
Tedra lay perfectly still on the narrow couch inside the closet, wishing she could go back to sleep to escape her discomfort. But she’d already slept the morning and half the afternoon away. Sleep wasn’t ready to come to her rescue again.
It was hot and stuffy inside the closet, but she had discovered the very moment she awoke that the nightmare wasn’t over. Her skin was still so sensitized from her ordeal that even the slight breeze today inside the bedchamber was an irritant. She had immediately shut herself away in the closet, where the air didn’t stir, quickly finding that the only relief she could get was in lying perfectly still, keeping even her breathing shallow.
Stars, what she wouldn’t give to have Corth there for five minutes. She was so primed for sex-sharing, she could likely experience a dozen orgasms in that short a time. Five minutes in the Rover’s meditech would do just as well.
She wasn’t going to get these wishes short of a miracle, or the hundreds of others she had made, most of them dealing with the disposal of the barbarian. But one in particular she had made she was going to accomplish on her own. At the first opportunity she was going to find her communicator and get out of Kan-is-Tra. There had to be warriors in other countries on Sha-Ka’an whom she could deal with more easily than Kan-is-Tran warriors. And the next time she wouldn’t make the colossal mistake of losing her phazor to one of them, or of giving, accepting, or even discussing challenge.
Stars, she was hungry, but she’d rather lie there and suffer the hunger pangs than go into the other room, where food had been left for her. Maybe she would starve herself. That would stick a bone up his nose but good. The thought gave her only a moment’s satisfaction before reality intruded to spoil it.
The barbarian wouldn’t let her starve. He’d just order her to eat, and refusing orders wasn’t an option she had, and not because of her honor. That got damned last night and wasn’t a part of this anymore. No, she’d do whatever he ordered because he’d punish her again if she didn’t, and she wasn’t going to go through that again, not ever.
She shivered with the memory of it, then moaned as that brought her nerve endings to life again. She had done a lot of moaning last night, and everything else he had said she would do. He’d wanted her to finish feeding him first, and she’d wanted to, just to buy time. But knowing what he was going to do to her had started it happening before he even touched her. She became so bothered from sitting on his loins, her hands started trembling and he had to finish the meal on his own. But once he was done . . .
It really was the most horrible experience of her life. Challen had brought her again and again to the point of hysterics, to where her need for him was so great she would have raped him if she could, to where she would have done anything, promised anything, for just one moment of the relief he could have given her. But relief wasn’t part of the deal, only the constant need for it, and he never let that need diminish even a little. He’d leave her alone for a few minutes while she prayed and prayed that it was over, but then he’d draw her back into his arms and start all over again.
She hadn’t known her body could be played like that, that it could be made to override her will, her instincts, her pride. Another part of it was that Challen made her think there would be an end, that relief would come before the night was over. His kisses said so, passionate. His caresses said so, in no way indifferent. She had assumed he himself was aroused and merely using his phenomenal control. But she finally came to understand that was just another aspect of the punishment, hope raised and then destroyed.
He hadn’t been aroused by what he did to her, not even a little, or by anything she did or said. She flamed with shame every time she thought of how she had crawled all over him, kissing him, begging him to join with her. But nothing she did could shake his control. That was perhaps what hurt the most, not the agony of sexual frustration he put her through, but the fact that she just didn’t have what it took to play the same game. To want a man so desperately but be unable to make him want her back was worse than demoralizing. It made her feel inept as a woman, worthless, totally undesirable, and so miserable she could cry again, remembering it.
Stars, how she wanted out of there, and immediately, before she had to face the barbarian again. She couldn’t bear the thought of that, especially with this need still upon her.
But even if movement wasn’t still a physical reminder of what she had experienced, she couldn’t go searching for her communicator yet. Her punishment wasn’t just finding out what hell was like for a single night. Sometime during those many hours that Challen had devoted to her, he informed her that she was also confined to his bedchamber for a week. And an added little bonus to that was that she was to remain in the room without benefit of clothing.
She supposed this was to make her long to wear the chauri she claimed to hate. At the very least it was to keep her regret for earning punishment uppermost in her mind. But that wasn’t necessary. She wasn’t ever going to forget what had been done to her. Challen had the results he wanted out of the punishment. She wasn’t going to break any more rules. But she had what she wanted out of it, too. She had thought she needed a bad beating with lots of pain to make her hate him. He had accomplished it without a single blow.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Challen rode his hataar deep into the woods before dismounting. Fog was trapped in pockets low to the ground, making it a gloomy place well suited to his mood. He wasn’t there to hunt, though the area teemed with animal life. Two plump gray curaki, likely mates, cooed down at him from a nearby tree. A karril slithered around the limb of another. Kisraki bolted when the hataar grazed too close to their warren, but the well-trained animal merely swished his tail.
Challen chose the tree the karril was hunting in to sit under, almost hoping the slimy thing would drop down in his lap. He watched its slow progress along the tree limb without really seeing it, looking inward instead and not liking what he saw, any more than he had when his thoughts and lack of control had driven him from the castle earlier.
He had come so close to challenging the shodan of Shalah for some ridiculous reason he could not even remember, and all because a woman had his emotions twisted in coils of regret, anger, confusion, exasperation, guilt, frustration; and, Droda help him, it was not lessening one bit. Half those emotions had been with him since the previous rising when Tamiron first told him of the woman’s misconduct.
He had felt anger, more anger than he could ever remember feeling, that she had put herself in danger by the use of her strange skills. Also present, but more unusual still, was a feeling of strong annoyance that she had not worn the colors that would proclaim her as his, regardless that he had not explained the necessity to her. It was a rule meant to avoid confusion and keep warriors from claiming protected women if they should happen to become separated from their escort for any reason. But Challen realized it was more important to him that Tedra De Arr simply not be bothered, that he wanted no other warrior getting close to her.
Confusion came next, because he was feeling things he did not understand, but mostly because his duty was suddenly abhorrent to him. The woman had to be punished. There could be no exceptions in this, and it was his responsibility to do it. But he wanted not to do it. And this reluctance was also something he had never felt before.
He had been punishing women since he had become old enough to be responsible for them, mostly for behavioral reasons, not for the breaking of rules. Women obeyed the rules that pertained to them because they knew those rules were for their protection and benefit. They also did not like punishment and tended to avoid it with proper behavior, so he had not punished many women. Doing so had never bothered him before. It was simply someth
ing that had to be done. But he had punished only a few women in the way he had punished his Kystrani, and only because they had been sharing his bed at the time.
Yet it was the most common form of discipline for a warrior to give his own woman, the one he most preferred to use if he felt more than normal concern for her, since it in no way did her harm, and it was quickly over with. Denying sustenance only made a warrior worry for his woman’s health. Giving total solitude only made them both suffer, as did other punishments such as Darasha labors, which caused exhaustion, discomfort from rarely used muscles, and any number of other lingering adverse effects. Arousal without release was the punishment women preferred, too, if given a choice, and for the same reasons, but also because they knew if their need had not diminished by the next day, it would be seen to, to their complete satisfaction.
Because it was preferable to women, he had thought Tedra would think so, too, but still he had not wanted to do it. That reluctance had led to his stupidity in thinking a double dose of dhaya juice would make punishing her easier. It did. It also affected his mind somewhat, and now his memory, in that there was little he recalled of the actual punishment other than that he had been totally lacking in concern or mercy during the administering of it.
He did remember that, and not even caring that it was so, when both feelings were a prerequisite of discipline. But also absent had been all sense of time, only he did not know it until the dhaya juice had let go some of its hold near the new rising, enough for him to realize the punishment had continued much, much longer than it should have. And therein lay a guilt so strong, he wondered if he could ever face the woman again.
The karril dropped suddenly from the tree, landing a few feet from Challen’s bent legs. It was best not to startle the poisonous thing as it had startled him, so he remained still until it slithered off into the brush. But it had brought him back to an awareness of his surroundings, and to the Kystrani voice box he held in one hand.