The Virgin

  “Yes,” she said. “I mean, yes, I’ll try. I don’t know if I’ll be any good at it. But I’ll try. But I’m only doing this because you told me to do it. You’re still topping. You ordered me to hurt you. Right?”

  “If that’s what you need to believe...”

  “I do.”

  “You might be surprised how much you like it.”

  “I’ve never done this before.” She felt nervous as a virgin. No, far more nervous. She hadn’t been nervous at all the night she’d given her virginity to Søren. This seemed like a far more terrifying threshold to cross. And yet...

  “You have done it. I watch you with the other Submissives and they do everything you tell them to do. You scare the shit out of them every day.”

  “If they weren’t such whiny little pussies, I wouldn’t have to.”

  “See?” He cupped her face with both hands. “There it is. Pure dominance. It’s in you. I saw it in you the night we met. You aren’t afraid to make decisions. You aren’t afraid to give orders. You aren’t afraid to be hated.”

  “Neither is Søren.”

  “Oui. And there is no one more dominant than he. But maybe you...”

  “Maybe me, what?”

  “Maybe you could give him a run for his money, no?”

  Eleanor took a long shuddering breath.

  “Well, it’s worth a shot anyway,” she said.

  Kingsley laughed then, a low sensual laugh that made her toes curl and her skin shiver. She did want him. She felt desire for him as acute as pain. It had been over two weeks since she’d had sex. She wouldn’t last a night more without it. Without him.

  “Any other limits?” she asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Hurt me,” he said. “You know where everything is in the room. Whatever he does to you, you can do it to me.”

  “If Søren finds out I topped you...” Eleanor said. “Without him here? Without his permission?”

  “What he doesn’t know won’t hurt us.” He raised one finger to his lips.

  She would have been less scared had she agreed to kill someone for Kingsley. But still, she raised her finger to her lips, as well.

  Now, here they were, alone in Kingsley’s bedroom. And she was going to hurt him. And she’d never done anything like this before in her life. Where did she start?

  She took a step back and looked Kingsley up and down. He needed something. Not a collar but something, something to make everything different between them.

  “How do you feel about blindfolds?” she asked.

  “I don’t mind them, but I’d rather see you.”

  “You see me all the time,” she reminded him.

  He gave her a long look, heated and heavy with meaning. “But not like this.”

  She took a quick breath. “No.” She couldn’t argue with him there. “Not like this.”

  Stepping back in front of him she started to unbutton his vest. She’d undressed him before at his command, but never of her own volition. He stood there, still and submissive, letting her pull the vest down and off his arms. She thought about folding it, thought about hanging it up. This was part of one of Kingsley’s sexiest Regency-style suits, after all. And likely one of his most expensive. Instead, she paused, looked at it and then dropped it on the floor.

  “You’re more like him than you can possibly know,” Kingsley said.

  To which Eleanor replied, “Don’t speak until spoken to.”

  Kingsley bowed his head in apology. She felt something new surging through her veins, something sweet and spiked and utterly intoxicating.

  Power.

  Kingsley remained still as she unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it out of his trousers. He had such a beautiful body—all lean muscle and old scars—that she couldn’t stop herself from kissing his naked shoulder as she pushed his shirt down his arms. First a kiss on the naked shoulder, then on the naked bicep, then the naked forearm and the naked wrist.

  The naked wrist.

  She left him standing there while she went down on her hands and knees by the bed. She pulled out a suitcase and opened it up. Inside was bondage equipment—ropes, adjustable spreader bars, cuffs and collars.

  And gauntlets.

  She took out two black leather gauntlets and laid them on the bed. She’d seen male submissives at The 8th Circle wearing various sorts of leather. Bicep cuffs, chest harnesses, but her favorite were the gauntlets. They looked so medieval, like something a knight would wear under his armor. And after a battle he’d strip down to nothing but the dirt and sweat and the leather braces on his wrists.

  Eleanor lifted Kingsley’s arm and held it against her chest. She wrapped the brace around his forearm and laced it. Her hands shook as she did it and she knew Kingsley could see it. But he didn’t tease her for once.

  “You like leather?” he asked. His voice was soft and the gentleness of his tone made her even more nervous.

  “Yeah, I do. On men especially.”

  “Why did you never tell me?”

  She glanced up at him.

  “You never asked.”

  Kingsley narrowed his eyes at her. “I should have asked. What other secrets are you keeping in here?”

  He touched her temple and let his fingers trail down until they rested on her chest under her shirt and over her heart.

  “Lots of secrets,” she whispered.

  “Tell me all your secrets. Tell me everything you want.”

  “You,” she said. “Like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “Submissive to me.”

  “You’ve fantasized about this?” he asked. “About me submitting to you?”

  Finally she had the wrist brace on his left arm. Lacing the brace onto his right arm went much more smoothly. She could do this. She could.

  It scared her to answer the question. The question wasn’t a question but a box, and if they opened the lid to this box, God only knew what would come out.

  “Please tell me, Elle,” he said so quietly she could barely hear him even in the potent pregnant silence of the room.

  “Yes.”

  And with that yes, she yanked the laces on the gauntlet and tied a neat quick bow.

  When she had the braces on his arms, she looked him up and down.

  “Almost perfect,” she said, appraising her handiwork. She unbuttoned his trousers, pushed them down and told him to step out of them.

  “Perfect,” she said with a smile. “Absolutely perfect.”

  Eleanor had only ever been on the receiving end of a beating. She had no idea how to throw a flogger, wield a single-tail. And she certainly wasn’t going to try to figure it out tonight. But there were other ways to hurt someone, ways she did know.

  “Lie on your back,” she ordered, and Kingsley did as he was told.

  Wild. For years she’d been doing everything Kingsley and Søren told her to do.

  Go here. Do this. Spread for him. Suck me here.

  Stand there and take it and take it and take it...

  Time to give as good as she got.

  Kingsley was lying naked on the bed, naked but for the elaborate leather arm braces laced from his wrist halfway up his forearms.

  Eleanor looked down at Kingsley. He kept his eyes lowered. She snapped her fingers in front of his face, one of Søren’s least endearing ways of getting her attention. It worked. Kingsley met her eyes.

  “Are you sure?” she asked. “Completely 100 percent sure about this?”

  “Elle, listen to me.” He met her eyes and looked deep and hard into them. “Yes.”

  She nodded and took one more long breath. What to do...what to do... She’d been hurting herself since she was a teenager. She knew how to give pain, right? She’d been the first person to hurt her own body.

  Then she had an idea.

  She opened the drawer in his nightstand and pulled out a scalpel from a leather case. Then she picked up the lit candle.

  “Blood-play or wax-play?” he asked. Both
seemed amenable to him.

  “Neither,” she said.

  She crawled onto the bed and straddled Kingsley’s hips. She pushed herself against his erection but didn’t let him inside her. His cock pulsed against her wet seam. She wanted him in her, yes, but she wanted to make him wait even more.

  “I did this to myself when I was a kid. Except I used a curling iron. My curling iron’s all the way in the other room, so we’ll have to improvise a little.”

  She brought the blade of the scalpel into the flame of the candle and watched while the fire heated the metal.

  When it turned a glowing red, she lowered the scalpel and pressed the flat of the blade against Kingsley’s stomach.

  With a gasp of pure pain, he closed his eyes tight and arched underneath her, arched so hard his cock went inside her. She shuddered as their bodies joined. She settled in on top of him, moving her hips to take him as deep as she could.

  “Vicious bitch,” he hissed through his clenched teeth. She’d given him a first-degree burn.

  “Did I hurt you?” she asked, worried she’d crossed a line already.

  “God, yes. Do it again,” he said between harsh breaths. “Please.”

  Eleanor laughed. “Well, since you asked so nicely.”

  Then she brought the blade into the flame again, heated it once more and brought it back to his stomach.

  The red-hot metal left half-moon shaped burns on his stomach. Every time she touched him with the flat of the scalpel blade, he shuddered as if in agony, grunted in the back of his throat and pushed his hips into her.

  After the fifth burn, and the sixth, sex and pain became the same thing to them. Their bodies were joined but only when she pressed the blade against his stomach, his hips, his chest, against the tender flesh of his inner bicep, did he thrust up and into her.

  Her own wetness poured out of her and coated him, sealing them together.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked, more curious than caring.

  “It’s excruciating,” Kingsley said. “Thank you.”

  “You want more?”

  “As much as you can give.”

  “Will you heal in time before Søren comes home?”

  “He’s back when? Six weeks?” Kingsley looked down at the burns on his chest, hips and arms. “Maybe.”

  “Well, in for a penny, in for a pounding,” she said, firing up the blade again.

  She burned him a seventh time. Then an eighth. She went all the way to sixteen and then stopped.

  “Sixteen’s a good number,” she said, putting the candle down.

  “What does it mean to you?” he asked.

  “I was sixteen when I saw you the first time. On the stairs at that orgy you were throwing. Remember what you said to me?”

  Kingsley grinned. “I said, ‘No children allowed.’”

  “And yet...here I am.” She pushed her hips forward and clenched her muscles around his cock.

  “Ah, but you’re not a little girl anymore. Not a virgin anymore.”

  “I haven’t been a virgin since I was twenty.”

  He raised his hand and swept it through her hair. He touched her cheek, her chin, her lips and tapped her lightly under her chin.

  “Not that kind of virgin,” he said softly. “Not after tonight.”

  She turned her head and kissed his palm.

  “Hold still,” she said.

  Kingsley lowered his arms. After that he didn’t move even to breathe.

  With the tip of the scalpel she carved a small “ES” into the delicate skin of his lower stomach, near enough to his cock to make him nervous. She went deep enough to draw blood but not so deep the cuts wouldn’t heal in a day or two. Kingsley could blame his burns on someone else if it came to that. Her initials on this most intimate part of Kingsley’s body would damn them both if Søren saw them.

  “Beautiful.” Kingsley sighed. His pupils were so dilated his eyes appeared solid black.

  “It’s not quite finished yet,” she said. She picked up the candle one more time and let a drop of wax fall onto the broken skin.

  Kingsley’s fingers dug into the sheets, his shoulders lifted up and with a hot spurt, he came inside her. His orgasm caught them both off guard. He grunted and gasped as his hips rose and fell beneath her. The pleasure of it was so intense she almost came from the force of his climax. She’d never been aroused this way before, never felt this mix of pleasure and power. It scared her how much she loved having Kingsley underneath her, hurting him as she did, pushing him to the edge until he lost control and came without any warning.

  He lay back on the bed, panting and breathing.

  “I think you liked that,” she said. Eleanor bent over and kissed him hard and deep.

  “Like is not the word, chérie,” he whispered against her lips.

  “We can’t ever tell him we did this,” she said.

  Kingsley smiled. “Our little secret.”

  Laughing softly she started to move again on him, riding him hard, chasing her own orgasm. She dug her fingernails into his chest, hard...harder...they broke the skin and kept breaking. Kingsley was brutally hard again inside her and when she came again, he came, too.

  And when he came again inside her, Elle woke up.

  * * *

  She lay on her stomach on her bed at the abbey. Her hips pushed down and into the bed and her vagina clenched emptiness. When her orgasm faded out, she groaned into her pillow, rolled onto her back and stared up at the ceiling.

  Another dream. She was losing her goddamn mind here.

  Elle crawled out of her bed and pulled on her black silk pajama pants and camisole, and a black sweater. She shoved her feet into shoes, and she left her room and her burning bed behind.

  Even now, almost eight months after leaving Søren, she still feared the front door that led to the outside world. Instead, she went out the back door into the garden and found a path to follow. It was brisk out on this spring night, and the air cooled her skin.

  At the center of the garden stood a statue of the Virgin Mary, solid white stone and life-size, her belly rounded with the unborn Christ inside her. A full moon gave her enough light to see Mary’s face. She looked so peaceful, so calm and serene. Elle had trouble believing a fourteen-year-old girl who got pregnant by God would be that relaxed about the situation.

  “Can I tell you a secret?” Kyrie asked from behind Elle.

  “Are you following me?”

  “Yes. But only because I couldn’t sleep. That’s my window.” Kyrie pointed to the nearest window looking out onto the garden.

  “It’s okay. I don’t mind the company. What’s your secret?”

  “When I was twelve, I had the biggest crush on the Virgin Mary. Is that weird?”

  Elle turned and found Kyrie standing in her white bathrobe and white veil behind her.

  “Not really. She’s beautiful. At least in all the paintings and statues she is.”