“Ride me,” he said, and she was happy to oblige. With tight movements of her hips, she drove her hips against Griffin while he kissed and licked her nipples. She smiled in victory when her vagina contracted on him and he gasped from the shock of pleasure. But still he held her wrists in his viselike grip even as she pushed them both closer to coming.
Her body burned with the heat of his body and hers. Her arms ached from being held so tightly. And when she thought she couldn’t take it one more minute, Griffin tossed her onto her back and slammed into her with rough and brutal thrusts that left her gasping. Blood surged through her thighs as she spread them wider for him. Her heart thudded in her chest. She contracted her stomach and tilted her hips until he was as deep inside her as any man could go. Finally she shuddered underneath him, as a fierce and forceful climax shook her to the core. Distantly, she was aware of Griffin’s orgasm that he was pushing into her with his last and roughest thrusts.
It was over, done, and yet Griffin remained inside her.
“Not yet,” he said when she wriggled underneath him in discomfort. He had her pinioned to the seat, impaled against it, and she couldn’t move until he did. His eyes met hers and for a second she thought she saw something more than friendship in them, more than passion. But he blinked and it was gone. Griffin pulled out of her and carefully removed the condom.
Kingsley looked at Søren. Søren looked at Kingsley.
Kingsley held up an eight.
Søren held up a seven.
“Fuck,” Griffin said. “I was hoping for at least one nine.”
“You didn’t stick your landing,” Kingsley said. “Work on your dismount.”
“Can you do better?” Griffin asked, sounding skeptical as he wiped himself off with a tissue and zipped his pants back up. It wouldn’t be easy to fuck her more thoroughly and enjoyably than Griffin had fucked her.
“Of course I can,” Kingsley said. He whistled, beckoning her to him. Eleanor crawled off Griffin’s lap and over to Kingsley’s. She waited, kneeling on the floorboard between Kingsley’s knees. He reached down and tapped her under the chin, a signal that required no other words.
She unzipped his trousers and brought her mouth down onto his erection.
“See?” Kingsley said. “Practice makes perfect.”
While she massaged and licked him with her tongue, he ran his fingers through her hair. He lifted the black mass of it, and she felt the flick of a cane on her back and flinched, a carefully controlled flinch. She knew the rules of such a game. She went down on Kingsley while Søren inflicted pain on her in some way, and at no point was she allowed to pass the pain to Kingsley. In other words...no biting.
Søren flicked her with the cane again—the thin plastic cane that licked her skin like a tongue of fire.
Eleanor forced herself to concentrate on Kingsley’s pleasure and ignored her own pain. It was the perfect torture. A few grunts of discomfort was all she allowed herself. And yet the cane came down again and again, a dozen or more times. Finally the caning stopped. Kingsley gripped her by the hair and forced her to look up at him.
“Good girl,” he said in French. Bien fille. She smiled and he cupped her chin, raising her off the floor. He wrapped his arms around her back and unzipped her skirt. Seconds later she was completely naked but for her white strappy high heels. Kingsley inclined his head at the seat. “Arms and knees,” he said, giving her a gentle order. Søren had moved to the other seat and now they had the back bench to themselves. Good, because they needed the room, especially when she moved into position and Kingsley entered her from behind.
With a few shallow strokes he readied her for full penetration. She did love the way Kingsley fucked her. He liked taking his time, making her squirm and beg for release. Even now he moved slowly inside her. Long slow thrusts that filled her and filled her and filled her. He slid his hand under her hips and pressed two fingers into her clitoris. Gently he rubbed the swollen knot until she hovered on the edge of another climax.
“Please,” she gasped.
“Come,” he said, granting her permission. She came with a hoarse cry but Kingsley didn’t. He kept pumping into her long after her orgasm had come and gone.
“Show-off,” she heard Griffin say, and she smiled into the cradle of her arms. Kingsley pulled out and dragged her down to her knees again. Once more she took him in her mouth, laving him with her tongue and lips until he came in her mouth, his fingers digging into her shoulders from the intensity of it.
Spent and exhausted, she sank to the floor, her head resting on Kingsley’s inner thigh. His fingers curled in her hair and caressed the back of her neck.
Griffin held up a nine.
Søren held up an eight.
“You’re worse than the Russian judge,” Kingsley said, glaring at Søren.
“It wasn’t your best work,” Søren said unapologetically.
Kingsley shook his head. “Armchair critics.”
Eleanor looked up and met Søren’s eyes. They were bright and gleaming, full of secret mirth. He whistled at her, summoning her to his side like a master calling his dog. Griffin vacated the seat next to Søren, and she crawled to her owner, her master, her lover, her heart.
“Your turn, sir?” she asked.
“All turns are my turn.” He slipped a finger between her collar and her throat and pulled her to him.
He kissed her and bit her bottom lip until she tasted a drop of blood. The kiss deepened and before she knew it, Søren had her on her back. He kissed her breasts, her nipples, her stomach and thighs and finally brought this attention to her clitoris. She was sore inside from being fucked twice already but it took only a few minutes of Søren’s expert ministrations before she was panting and eager to be penetrated again. Søren ignored her pleas and continued to edge her closer to climax before pulling back again, edging her close again and once more pulling back.
“A master,” Kingsley said to Griffin. “Sadism by pleasure is as vicious as sadism by pain.”
“I’m learning this,” Griffin said.
“Don’t learn from him,” Eleanor said between heavy breaths. “I have all the sadists I need already.”
Søren replied by swatting her hard on the outer thigh, hard enough she knew she’d have a bright red handprint there for the next hour at least.
She flinched and Søren chose that moment to rise up over her, push her wrists deep into the seat by her head and enter her with one hard deep thrust. Eagerly she wrapped her legs around his lower back and locked her ankles together. She was so wet for him by now she could feel it dripping out of her and onto the leather.
Her wrists ached under his viciously strong hands. She hoped she would have bruises from them later. Only the other submissives she knew would understand why she wanted bruises, wanted welts, wanted something on her body to remind her of what had been done to her. But she and Søren couldn’t live together, couldn’t spend their days together. They had only a few nights a week, all stolen, and the bruises made a road map to her memory of everything he’d done to her. She’d be reliving this night for weeks...
Griffin and Kingsley were still in the car, of course. But they might as well have been a thousand miles away for all she cared about them. Søren was inside her and she was underneath him and they were the only two people in the world.
“Happy birthday, Little One,” Søren said in her ear between kisses. But she said nothing in reply. She couldn’t speak, lost as she was in his thrusts, in his kisses, in the moment of being used over and over and over again. “It’s only beginning. You’re ours all night...”
All night. Forever. She didn’t care as long as he kept fucking her like this, as if it was the only thing keeping them alive. She couldn’t stop her hips from meeting his, couldn’t stop taking him deeper and deeper into her. When her orgasm came it was so hard she went silent, her body locked up and she opened her eyes.
Fuck.
* * *
The orgasm from her dream was
so strong it had woken her up. Her vaginal muscles were contracting so hard against nothing her eyes watered. She slid her hand into her underwear and rubbed her pulsing clitoris, trying to make the orgasm go on and on.
She collapsed against the sweat-drenched sheets and kicked the blankets off the bed. Her body still buzzed and trembled from the force of her climax. Craziness...she hadn’t orgasmed in her sleep since she was a teenager. But ever since coming to her mother’s convent, it happened once a week at least. It had been a dream, but a dream so vivid it was as if she were there, reliving every moment of her last birthday when Søren had surprised her with that incredible night in Kingsley’s Rolls-Royce. She could still feel Søren inside her. She could still smell Griffin’s soap. She could still taste Kingsley in her mouth.
Elle sat up, found her duffel bag and unzipped it. From the bottom of it she pulled out her collar. She held it in her hands and looked it at. She’d been wearing it the night she lost her virginity to Søren. She’d worn it every night she spent with him and not once since she’d left him. It was the symbol of his ownership of her and despite that, she’d kept it. If she could get rid of it, toss it away, throw it out, then she could be free, completely free.
But she wasn’t free. The dreams proved that. And she couldn’t get rid of her collar. Not yet. She put it back in her bag and resolved to forget about it. At least this time she didn’t kiss it before putting it away.
The 5:00 a.m. bell rang. She grabbed the blankets off the floor, made her bed and pulled on the thick white terry cloth bathrobe she’d been given her second day here. Even in a house of all women, modesty was to be maintained at all times. No running to the bathroom at night wearing only underwear and a T-shirt. She had to be covered up, neck to toe, every day, at all times.
In the bathroom at the end of the hall, Elle took a quick shower, pulled her hair back in a tight knot and dressed in the black tights, long black skirt and white blouse that had become her uniform here at the abbey. No one would have mistaken her for a nun, but no one from her old life would have recognized her now in such conservative clothing.
Alone in the kitchen, Elle had her usual breakfast of coffee, eggs, fruit and toast. Only on Sunday mornings did the menu change to something more exotic than the breakfast basics. While the sisters were at Lauds, Elle headed to the laundry room where she would spend the next five hours until lunchtime.
Her life at the abbey had been difficult at first. She argued with the more irascible nuns, she’d been unceremoniously tossed out of the kitchen for ruining one too many dishes with her bad cooking and she’d been kicked out of the library for rearranging all the books. Who on earth had decided to put the books in order by title? No one who’d ever worked in a real library or a bookstore would arrange books in such an ass-backward way. She’d worked in a bookstore for years and had even fucked a librarian. She knew how books worked. But the sisters had their own idea of order and didn’t appreciate any attempts at improvement.
That left her alone in the laundry room all day. She washed sheets. She dried sheets. She folded sheets. The next day she did it again. She washed habits. She ironed habits. She folded habits. The next day she did it again. Hardly slave labor, but it certainly didn’t excite her. Then again, no one came to a convent for excitement. She’d come to the convent for the opposite of excitement, and the opposite of excitement was exactly what she’d found here. She had safety. She had peace and quiet. And she hadn’t seen Søren and Kingsley in months.
Elle refilled her coffee mug, put her dishes in the sink and left the kitchen. Once in the laundry room she tried to work up the energy to do something. All she wanted was to go back to bed and sleep until the second coming. Of course, in her theology the second coming had nothing to do with Jesus’s return and everything to do with having another orgasm.
She hopped onto the tile counter by the sink and looked out the window while she drank her coffee. She could see the road from the window, see the front lawn of the abbey and could see the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the convent’s acreage—one hundred twenty in total, give or take a few square feet. All of it from the sides of the abbey to the edge of the farthest field was fenced in in one way or another. The side and back gardens were fenced in by iron. The fields of farmland and well-manicured forest were fenced in with white wood. And the entire abbey was fenced in by the rules. Rule number one—never leave the grounds without permission. Elle didn’t have permission to leave, so here she stayed.
Since she couldn’t leave and didn’t want to, she stared out at the road and watched the occasional car pass on its way to or from town. She saw one now, a blue Audi, but instead of passing by like every other car she’d seen since coming here, it turned into the long abbey driveway. Slowly it crept toward the convent before coming to a gentle stop.
As if on cue, a dozen sisters in their black-and-white habits streamed from the front doors toward the car. Elle had never seen the sisters leave the abbey. They did, of course. Sometimes they had doctors’ appointments or dentists’ appointments or Mother Prioress would visit with someone important in the city who wanted to buy their land or sell them more. But Elle had only heard about sisters leaving, never seen it happen.
The car doors opened and a man got out of the driver’s side, a woman out of the passenger’s. They looked about midforties, married, not terribly interesting. But then the woman opened the back door of the Audi and out stepped a young woman. She had reddish-brown hair sun-streaked with pale gold highlights that reminded Elle of feathers, like the tips of a dove’s wings. Her hair fell in waves down her back. She had flowers in her hair—white flowers. And the long dress she wore was simple and white. The man pulled a small suitcase from the trunk. The woman took the girl’s hand in hers, but only for a moment.
Now the sisters surrounded the trio and quickly pried the young woman from her parents. Yes, of course, they had to be her parents and this girl was entering the order. It didn’t seem right, though. The girl barely looked twenty-one. And what a beauty...a tiny thing who couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds.
“Don’t do it, sweetheart,” Elle whispered. “Get back in the car and drive...”
As if the girl could hear her, she glanced up at the window and squinted. Elle froze. Did the girl see her? Probably. What did it matter? The girl raised her hand and waved at her. Elle didn’t know what to do so she waved back. Mother Prioress turned and glanced up at the window, but Elle had already ducked away from it out of sight. She panted in nervousness and didn’t know why. Nothing but a girl, a beautiful young girl who’d waved at her. Nothing to panic about.
Still, Elle walked to the other window in the room and peered out.
The sisters had formed two even lines like an honor guard, and the girl was between them walking toward the front door of the convent. Elle knew what would happen next. There would be a ceremony in the main chapel and the girl would be dressed in her habit and veiled. She’d choose a new name—Sister Mary Something—and profess her temporary vows. And by lunch, she’d be a Sister of St. Monica.
Her old life would be over. Even her name would be gone.
Halfway through the line toward the door, the girl stopped, turned around and ran back to the car. She embraced her mother and her father. Poor thing. She must be scared to death, heartbroken, sobbing...
Or was she?
The girl, using her mother as a shield of sorts, glanced up to the window again and stared straight at Elle. And then—and Elle was entirely certain she didn’t imagine it—the girl winked at her.
Elle laughed and shook her head. Then she composed her face. If Mother Prioress had told her one time, she’d told her a thousand times—behave.
She wrenched herself away from the window and promptly resolved to forget she’d seen that beautiful girl and her mysterious wink. After all, she was about to become a nun and nuns had to abide by vows. Vows of obedience and vows of chastity.
Then again, when had a little thing
like a vow of chastity ever stopped Elle before?
11
Haiti
THE WOMAN ROSE off the ground and dusted the sand off her knees, brushed the tears off her face.
“Thank you for your help,” she said. “Have a lovely day.”
With that cool dismissal¸ she reached down and picked up a canvas tote bag by its handles, turned around and walked away from him. Kingsley didn’t like that. At all.
“What’s your name?” he asked, jogging to catch up with her.
“Why do you ask?”
“No reason.”
“If you don’t have a reason for wanting to know my name, I don’t have any reason for telling you.”
Kingsley winced. She had him there.
“Sorry. I don’t have reasons for much of what I do. If you asked me why I’m even in Haiti, I couldn’t tell you why.”
“Then I won’t ask,” she said. She started walking off again.
“May I carry your bag for you?” he asked, adjusting his strides to keep up with hers. She had magnificently long legs and walked briskly. “It looks heavy.”
“It is heavy. And no, you may not carry it for me.”
“Would you like me to leave you alone?” he asked, not wanting to admit defeat but willing to admit it if necessary.
She stopped and looked at him. A long studied look. He was grateful he had sunglasses on over his eyes; her gaze was so piercing, so searching, that he almost took a step back away from her.
“No,” she said at last. “You don’t have to leave me alone.”