Chapter 9
CHAPTER 9
Isabella
I hope that Francisco might let up a little after the ballroom.
I’m dead wrong. He doesn’t back down at all. I’m not sure what I thought he would back down from—being himself? Taking what he wants? No. Not that. A small part of me thinks he’ll soften, and we’ll playact newlywed bliss.
There is bliss. Not the kind I expected. It confuses me in a way that I didn’t expect to feel. I can count on Francisco making me come and writhe underneath his hands and beg. He does it every day, without fail. I just didn’t think it would be...like this.
With a man like Francisco, it was impossible not to think he might be dominant. But he’s more than dominant. He’s royalty, and he rules every room he walks into in this house.
The morning after my spanking he strides into my dressing room and tells Lila to strip off my clothes. She does it without hesitation, and I find myself helping her. It’s Francisco who licks me that morning, not Lila, though he does make her stand close enough to see every movement of his tongue. I burn hotter with embarrassment with every hour that goes by. Every hour that he orders me to bend over this item of furniture or that item of furniture and display myself for him.
He’s not shy with my body, or with using it. Whenever he wants. Wherever.
Whoever is in the room. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is the force of his desire.
It’s a powerful thing. I can’t stand up to it.
And worse, I don’t want to.
A deep-seated voice in my mind reminds me over and over again that this kind of sex pushes the boundaries of propriety. The fact that it makes me so wet mortifies me until I realize that voice is the outside world. A jealous outside world.
A world that wishes a stunning, powerful man would bend it over the arm of a sofa and spank it until it was wet and squirming and crying all at the same time.
It’s never going to be simple between us.
I’m always going to have complex feelings about Francisco and the lies he told to get me to marry him. Lies of omission. He was up front with me about his expectations in a broad sense. Never the specifics.
I don’t forgive him for that. I can’t forgive him, can I?
He spanks me for every reminder, as if to drive the point home. Not enough to be a true punishment. Just enough to remind me of the deal we made.
A deal that’s very much still in effect.
On the fifth day, I wake up on my back.
It’s strange for me. I’m usually curled up on my side or sprawled out over a pillow, but sometimes when I’m dreaming especially hard I’ll end up flat on my back. I don’t remember the dream. It still feels too early to get up, so I try to turn over.
And I’m stopped by something tugging at my wrist.
Something metal.
I jerk both wrists toward my body. They don’t move. They don’t go anywhere, and it’s only then that I think to open my eyes and find out what the hell is going on.
Francisco and the butler look down at me from the edge of the bed. All my covers have been stripped away, and there are chains. Heavy and strong and with only the slightest amount of slack. I open my mouth to question my husband.
He looks at me from beneath those heavily lashed eyelids, daring me to defy him.
Maybe I would have, in the beginning. Maybe I would have raged and cursed and tried to run. Only two of those things are options for me now. I can’t run, and what I feel isn’t rage. It’s more complicated than that. Hot desire is already pooling between my spread thighs. The cooler air in my bedroom teases me there. I’m getting used to other people in the room, but the butler’s presence still makes my face heat and my breath hitch.
His presence and the flogger in his hand.
Not my husband’s hand.
The butler’s hand. Anthony, that’s his name.
He’s handsome enough, with dark golden hair and a square jaw. It reminds me of the way household help in Regency England would be chosen for their attractiveness. Is that how Francisco chose him? And more importantly, did he choose him because he found Anthony attractive or because he thought his future wife would?
Francisco smiles down at me, the corners of his mouth curved in a darker cousin of delight. He backs up with deliberate care, creating exactly enough space for the butler to come forward.
“Begin.”
At Francisco’s command, Anthony brings the flogger down on one of my breasts. The leather tails sting over my swollen nipples. My back bows against the bed. There’s nowhere for me to go. Anticipation makes every hair on my body stand up. Somehow it’s worse, being able to see it. I thought a blindfold would be the worst thing, but no, it’s being able to watch the flogger fly toward me while I am powerless.
Lust flares in Anthony’s pale brown eyes, but that’s not what turns me on. He’s not the master of this scene. He’s not Francisco. No, he’s merely a prop. A prop like the thin black flogger that plays over my stomach and down over my thighs.
Francisco makes a sound of disapproval, and the butler shifts to the foot of the bed. No. Surely not. That’s not what he’s going to do, and not what Francisco meant. I fight back the question on my lips and force myself to wait. The few moments it takes him to get to his new position are enough time for me to feel everything.
My mind rebels against the idea of the butler and the flogger and my husband, standing nearby but not wielding it himself. It’s wrong for him not to be the one to do this. Isn’t it? But as his eyes move possessively over my body, I realize it’s not wrong. It’s a sign of his power. He commands everyone in this household. He might as well have the flogger in his hand. It’s the same. Everything springs from him.
The flogger comes down between my legs.
It sends me spiraling. Francisco wanted this. He wanted to watch the tails of the flogger connect with my softest, most secret flesh. He wanted to watch me cry out and hear that cry turn into a moan. He wanted to watch me thrash against the bed, held in place by chains he put around my wrists and ankles himself. I know he did.
“Three more,” he says.
The first one is a shock to the system. All that leather on already sensitive flesh. The second cracks me open. And the third wrenches a sudden orgasm out of me. I’m not the kind of woman who comes from this kind of treatment, except that I am. Except that Francisco made me this way. Or brought it out of me. Maybe these desires were always there, always hiding under the surface. It’s possible I was always this filthy and depraved.
This is as bad as it can get. This is as wrong as it can get.
“Fuck her throat,” says Francisco.
It sounds so elegant, coming out of his mouth. Almost like a royal edict.
Anthony doesn’t hesitate. He climbs up on the bed and straddles me. I’m so completely exposed. So completely at his mercy. I’m at my own butler’s mercy, except it’s really Francisco’s mercy, and Francisco isn’t going to be merciful.
The butler unzips his pants and takes his cock out. Francisco hands him a condom the way you’d hand someone a cigarette, and the butler unwraps it and rolls it on.
I open my mouth.
“Good,” says Francisco, and a pleased flush moves from my forehead to the tip of my toes. Praise from him shouldn’t do this to me. I haven’t even been his wife for a month. It makes no difference. It’s humiliating. Horribly humiliating, the way this makes me feel. I was not raised to crave compliments in situations like this. I never thought that being a good wife would mean opening my mouth to accept the butler’s cock.
I never thought that it would give me a twisted pleasure.
The butler leans over me and pushes in against my tongue. I don’t like the taste of the condom, but it makes this different from Francisco. He can enter my mouth without a barrier. Apparently, the butler cannot. Everyone in this house is an extension of Francisco. His word is law. So the butler fucks my mouth like he owns it, too, with deep, almost frantic strokes.
Francisco watches.
Impatience builds in his eyes, and my body matches it. I don’t want him to be impatient. I want him to give in to his impatience and touch me. He doesn’t do it. Francisco rarely gives in to anything.
“Ten seconds.” His voice holds no sign that he’s bothered in the slightest by how long the butler is taking with my mouth. For his part, the butler fucks harder. His hips jerk as he spills himself inside the condom. It’s hot through the rubber. There’s no time for him to enjoy it. He climbs off me, and off the bed, and puts his uniform back into place. The only sign he was just stroking down my throat is the pickup in his breathing. Francisco sends him away with a look.
It’s only when the door is closed that my husband removes his clothes. He’s perfection in them and breathtaking out of them, all bronzed skin and hard muscles. Naked, it’s clear what fills out his tuxedos so beautifully. He has a powerful physicality. Francisco climbs onto the bed without preamble, and now it’s not the butler’s uniformed thighs straddling me, it’s his naked, hair-dusted ones.
Then his crown is between my lips and I’m taking him into my mouth, steel under velvet skin, and I wrap my tongue around him. How do I feel this feverish for him and this suspicious of him at the same time?
Francisco laughs. “You were holding out on our poor butler. Do that with your tongue again.” I do, and a low groan escapes him. “I have to fuck you for that.”
He has to fuck me, and I have to take it. I’m chained to the bed. Held open for him by lengths of metal. It makes my hips work faster as he positions himself between my thighs and strokes inside me. I’m wet, soaked from the chains and the butler and from Francisco’s eyes. He stretches me anyway. My husband fucks me like it’s his personal mission to find out how much I can take. I manage his thick length by fucking him back. I let my hips work themselves into the pain instead of away from it, and then the pain goes away. I’m being stretched by him, taken by him, but it doesn’t hurt. I clench on him over and over.
Francisco angles his hips so that my clit gets more contact, and this sends me tumbling over and into another orgasm. It tugs on the memory of the flogger, and another release comes hard on the heels of the first one. I’m so dirty. These things we do are wrong. They’re wrong for a good wife and a good daughter. I don’t say a word of this to Francisco. He’d only fuck harder. Punish harder. Take more.
“One more time on my cock.” Francisco reaches between us and finds my clit. It’s too sensitive from coming so much, but his finger against it is impossible to ignore. The chains hold me down, but it’s his hand that makes me feel caged in by him. It’s a painful pleasure at first. Francisco watches my face intently. For signs that it hurts too much?
No. For signs that he should fuck me harder. He does, and it has the outcome he wanted. I come again as he fucks me, taking me with a kind of abandon he’d never show in front of anyone outside this household. He’s bared to me in this moment.
I come in a short, jagged burst. That’s the last one. No more.
“Why?”
Francisco lifts his head to where he’d rested it against my shoulder. “Why what?”
“Why does it feel so good?” I mean for it to be a joke, but it comes out plaintive, almost sad.
My husband leans down and kisses my bare shoulder. “Because it’s what your body wants, my dear wife. You can’t deny it. You were made for this. You were made for me.”