Page 17 of Her Viking Guardian

She rose again, leaving me gasping. Her fingers stilled on my pussy.

“I looked at the ship,” I said. My voice came out only slightly ragged despite everything. “And the carvings. I documented everything I could with my phone.” All of that was true. I was telling the truth. I focused on that.

Her fingers withdrew entirely.

The absence was punishing in a way I would not have predicted before this afternoon. I pressed my lips, shamefully moist with my mistress’s arousal, together and said nothing.

“And then?” Giovanna asked.

“And then I left.” Also true, technically. Eventually.

Her fingers returned, a single fingertip this time, tracing a path so light it barely qualified as touch. My breath came out in a shudder. Above me, I saw Giovanna’s vagina clench. Hot shame and hotter arousal swept through me at the lewd sight.

“You were there for seventy-eight minutes,” she said. “The sensors are quite specific about duration.”

Sensors. Oh, God. What have I gotten myself into? The idea that there were sensors in that ancient, apparently forgotten cavern made my stomach lurch.

“I was thorough,” I tried. “I’m an archaeologist. I don’t rush.”

The finger withdrew again.

I lay there in the suspended, maddening absence of sensation, staring up at her waxed pussy, and I thought, she knows I’m leaving things out. She doesn’t know what things. My job was to keep it that way, to give her enough truth to seem cooperative while the rest of it—the bride saddle, the voice, the tree, the young woman’s eyes looking up at me from inside a vision—I would keep behind my teeth, because I wasn’t even entirely certain any of it had happened. I had been alone and overstimulated and academically overwhelmed. The rational explanation remained available. I held onto it with both hands.

“The passage,” Giovanna said. “You went through the passage at the rear of the cavern.”

My stomach dropped. “There were other chambers,” I said carefully. “I looked inside them briefly.” I paused. “The preservation was extraordinary. Whatever treatment had been applied to the wood⁠—”

“What did you see in the chambers?”

Her fingers returned. Two of them this time, and not feather-light: a proper, deliberate pressure against the slick heat of me that made my back arch off the table as much as the waist strap permitted. I cried out.

“What did you see?” she repeated, not raising her voice at all, while her fingers moved with a patience that seemed designed to make language impossible.

“Furniture,” I gasped. “Old. Well-preserved. Some kind of… a frame, with leather…”

The fingers stopped. Withdrew. Left me trembling and empty and furious at my own body.

“A frame,” Giovanna said. “With leather.”

“Yes.” My voice was almost steady. Almost.

She went quiet for a moment. I felt her shift her weight a little, and then her fragrant, wet, warmth descended over my face again and I understood that the interrogation was continuing on two levels simultaneously: that she would take her pleasure and withhold mine in alternating rhythm until she had what she wanted, and that what she wanted was something I hadn’t given her yet.

I opened my mouth and tried to breathe around her grinding pussy. I tried to think about the correct answer to a question she hadn’t asked precisely but was clearly circling.

Her fingers came back between my legs. One slow, exploratory stroke, and then—without any warning—the withdrawal again.

“Oh, God,” I said, muffled against her. “Please⁠—”

She lifted. I felt the coolness of the air on my face where her hot wetness had been.

“Please what?” she asked conversationally.

I bit my upper lip. I would not say it. I would not say please touch me, not to this woman, not in this room, not strapped to this table.

“Please,” I said instead, “tell me who you are. What this organization is. The agency, the—the titles you use. The collar you wear.” I had nothing to lose by asking, I thought. The worst she could do was withhold her fingers again, which she was already doing.

Or she could whip me again, said another voice, and I felt my forehead crease at the dismaying clench the thought had brought, right where Giovanna would see. Desperate to distract her, I went on speaking.