Page 56 of Her Viking Guardian

She unclipped the leash first. The sudden absence at my throat left me feeling strangely naked, though I remained physically far from free. I felt my Viking master’s eyes on me as if his gaze carried physical weight.

My collar came away. Then the cuffs at my wrists. Then the ankle restraints. Each removal should have felt like relief. Instead it felt like exposure of a more frightening kind, as if the visible signs had been doing work I had not understood until they disappeared.

The cock grew heavier on my tongue.

Giovanna unfastened the belt around my waist and slid it free. I nearly whimpered around the nymphobus at the sensation of my body denuded not just of clothing but, it felt like, of category as well: what kind of a thing was I now?

“You imagine,” she said, “that without these you become ordinary again. A modern woman. An autonomous academic. A creature of theories and choices.” Her hand ran once, cool and assessing, down the bare line of my spine. “No. If we have done our work properly, you are more bound now than before.”

Then I heard the unmistakable sound of a mastix’s tails being swept through the air.

My whole body seized.

“May I whip your bed thrall, Herra Magnusson? Three lashes to emphasize the lesson.”

I heard a sob come from my chest. To my dismay, it made me suckle at the hard manhood in my mouth, as if for comfort.

“By all means,” my master replied.

Then Giovanna addressed me, in her didactic tone.

“Your leathers,” Giovanna went on, “must be worn in your heart.”

The first stroke of the mastix landed across my backside with a crack that exploded into the now-too-familiar sensation of Roman discipline. I cried out around Nymphobus Oceanus’s cock, the sound turning into a strangled moan as my tongue moved instinctively under the shaft. My hands clutched involuntarily at the backs of his knees. He made a low sound and finally thrust a little deeper, using the opening my cry had created.

“Attend to the nymphobus,” Giovanna said. “Pain is not an excuse for negligence.”

I tried to breathe through my nose. Tears flooded my eyes at once.

“It is the heart that obeys,” she said.

The second stroke came lower, biting across the tender flesh where thigh became bottom. I sobbed around the hard phallus in my mouth. Its owner’s hand came to rest atop my head, as if to warn me that if he wished to enforce my service he could, but at the same time to tell me, wordlessly, that my obedience must be of my own free will.

CHAPTER 28

Ilsa

The third lash fell.

It seemed to arrive from nowhere and from everywhere at once, a bright, slicing line of pain across the heated ruin of my bottom. In that exact instant my whole awareness seemed to swing backward, as if the blow itself had turned my body into an instrument tuned toward the man behind me.

I felt my master there without seeing him. I felt his gaze on the naked place Giovanna had just marked again. I remembered, with a vividness so immediate it made me struggle a little around the nymphobus’s cock, the pressure of Henrik’s hand in my hair in the refectory, the heavy thrust of him into my mouth while people talked over breakfast.

The thought came unbidden and complete: was my Herra hard now? Again, so soon? From watching?

From watching me kneel naked with another man’s penis held obediently in my mouth while a woman whipped me and taught me what I was?

The idea should have horrified me, I knew. Instead it divided me. My rational mind recoiled, scrambling to name the degradation, to restore categories, to insist that wanting such a thing meant damage or coercion or some syndrome I could have cited with chapter and verse under other circumstances. But below that, lower and older, something in me lifted its face like an animal scenting rain.

I hoped my master’s manhood had gotten hard.

For a second I nearly lost track of my mouth’s service to the other man’s penis. My lips tightened instinctively around him. Heat surged between my thighs so sharply that the pain in my bottom seemed to feed it rather than interrupt it.

I hoped—not truly believed, because I knew better, because I already knew the quality of Herra Henrik’s control and the way he husbanded his appetites like resources in wartime—but hoped anyway, in a frantic and shameful flash, that he had one hand in his trousers, that he was stroking himself while he watched Giovanna whip me and watched me serve the nymphobus like a proper little columba.

He would never. Or almost certainly never. The certainty of his self-command was part of what made him terrifying, and part of what made him… my whole body answered the thought before I could finish it.

Hotter. Sexier. More arousing.