Star Slave (21 page)

‘You're very lovely,' he said. His voice was thick, husky, with a moderate foreign accent. Italian, Felicity thought. Perhaps he was a big wheel in the Mafia, she wondered fancifully. ‘I just wish I had more time. Unfortunately, my plane leaves in a couple of hours. I'm glad you could make it. Would you like another drink?'

‘No thank you.' She almost asked a question, then remembered Magda's instructions. In the normal luxury of these surroundings they seemed ridiculous, yet she obeyed. Even here she was no longer Felicity Keynes, but someone altogether different. She flushed at the excitement this thought caused her.

‘Right,' he announced, in a businesslike tone. He took the glass from her and put it to one side, and then casually unbuckled his belt and shuffled out of his trousers. His underpants were baggy and loose in the leg. She could see no sign of his genitals under their concealment. ‘Over here.' He extended his hand, she took it, and he drew her over to the polished table right by the window. ‘Bend over,' he ordered, watching her move obediently, and said with evident satisfaction, ‘That's right... lovely.'

Felicity's heart sank. It was to be another beating. She turned her head to the side and felt the cold polished surface of the wood against her cheek. He lifted the hem of her skirt and folded it carefully over her back. She wondered how he would deal with her underwear, having to undo the three hook-and-eye fasteners under her crotch. Should she help him? Should she do it herself? But then she realised he was not going to bare her bottom at all.

‘The cane, I think,' she heard him say. ‘Is that all right?'

Speak when spoken to. She cleared her throat and stammered uncertainly, ‘Y-yes.' Her frame tensed as she heard a short sharp whistling sound as he swiped the instrument of punishment through the still air. Her outstretched fingers clung to the far edge of the table, her buttocks clenched, and she held her breath, waiting in dread for the agony to begin.

‘Oh, here,' he said, ‘better put this in. Just in case.' He pushed a clean handkerchief into her mouth, and she bit down on it. Which was just as well, for as the first stroke cut deep into her behind, in spite of the flounced lace and satin protecting it, she jerked and screamed, the gag trapping the protests deep in her throat. ‘Only a few more!' he warned, his voice thick and unsteady with his arousal. ‘Don't move!' Somehow she managed to stay down over the table, pressing herself to its hardness in a feeble attempt to escape the pain, while five more cuts bit into her poor flesh.

The breath whistled through her flared nostrils and tears streamed down her cheeks as she chewed desperately at the sodden handkerchief to suppress her anguish. She was trembling violently, grateful through the haze of pain for the steady burn that told her the caning was over. She felt she couldn't move, though her hands longed to caress the burning rounds.

‘Good girl!' he panted, and she felt those stubby fingers fumbling with clumsy impatience at her damp crotch, dealing with the difficult fasteners until he finally succeeded and the piece of material covering her sex fell away.

He lifted the little tail of the garment, folded it onto her back, and prodded her feet apart with the toe of his shoe. She instinctively readjusted her stance a little for him, and then felt his rampant prick probe into the valley of her abused bottom. She felt his insistent thumbs prising her cheeks apart. She groaned into the wet hanky, expecting him to penetrate her back passage. But he didn't. He grunted and said, ‘You're not one of them, then? Or haven't they done you yet?' Then she completely forgot the cryptic words as his thick penis bludgeoned through into the receptive moistness of her sex, and buried itself deep into her pulsating sheath.

Oddly, the pounding of his fat belly and his groin against her tortured buttocks was comforting, and then highly arousing, as her excitement spiralled to meet his at the crucial moment. She felt the powerful spurt of his coming and drove back against him frantically, the walls of her vagina spasming, the orgasm bursting upon her with all its consuming finality.

 

Michael stared sourly at the Mercedes in front of him in the fast lane, and crept close to the tinted rear window, gunning his motor imperiously. The silver-grey car pulled over to the middle lane, and Michael inched past. The side rear windows were tinted too, so he couldn't see if anyone was sitting in the back, but he could see the liveried outfit of the chauffeur at the wheel, staring stolidly ahead and ignoring the malevolent glare Michael threw at him. Doubtless some loaded foreigner heading for the airport. Perhaps a wealthy sheikh with his four wives and the boot crammed with half of Harrods. He forgot about it at once, concentrating on the road instead, and on his own troubled thoughts.

He was late for the meeting, just as he'd been late into the office, where he'd put in his first appearance since before the holiday break. And here it was the thirtieth. Sir Robert had not been too pleased, that was made blatantly clear. In his opinion holidays were for the plebs. For the first time, while Sir Robert chewed his bollocks off, Michael had thought he spied a hint of compassion in Louise's beautifully made-up eyes, as well as the knicker-moistening lust he fancied he could read there. And his PA wasn't the only one with the hots for him, he liked secretly to imagine. The outer office was redolent with the soft sounds of squelching labia, he liked to think, every time he walked past the girls with his best smile.

But not now. He felt the heat of shame spreading up through his body and squirmed in the comfortable bucket seat, his ultra sensitive awareness sending tremors of recalled pain from the tiny fissure of his anus. As on countless occasions during the past four days, he experienced that feeling of horror, of weak helplessness, at the trauma he had undergone with that wicked little bastard, John.

How could he have let that, of all things, happen to him?

He stiffened, knuckles white on the wheel, and from his clamped jaws an anguished groan escaped. And merged with all the tormenting guilt and revulsion, was the tormenting realisation that he'd loved everything he did and had been done to him. The latent thrill of being helpless, the violation of his manhood, and the unique excitement of passivity while being remorselessly penetrated, which had turned his preconceived notions of gender, of sex, so totally upside down.

He had lain there after the shuddering agony of that withdrawal, and sobbed brokenly, unable to move a muscle except for the involuntary trembling which ran through him. He had lain there, aware of his nakedness, his sense of being conquered, of being possessed by the slim figure who so fascinated him. It should have been he, Michael, who was the macho male role player in this homosexual relationship. He had only allowed John to seduce him in the first place because of the striking resemblance to Felicity. The alluring John, with his dramatic beauty and his body slinky and desirable in her silken scraps of clothing - that's what had tempted him beyond endurance.

So how had he wound up adopting the feminine role? Though it scourged him to recall, it had been so all the way through. He'd lain helplessly while John tossed him off that first time... and the second. And still subservient, he'd been pushed literally to his knees to perform fellatio, to pay homage to that prick jutting so weirdly and wonderfully from the black silk of Felicity's underwear. And all of that had led, inevitably, to the moment of awful truth when he had finally and fully surrendered his body to the spearing pain, and the terrifyingly thrilling climax of his total submission.

He had given up completely, weeping like a newly deflowered virgin, letting John tend and be tender, cleansing and soothing him, folding him to sleep in his arms.

It had been the following afternoon when they eventually rose from bed. Michael had used the excuse of work to escape. ‘Call me,' John said, and Michael had nodded, blushing, and fled - fled to a three day nightmare of solitary drinking and weeping and self-flagellation; mental only but stinging nevertheless.

At the meeting, in a complex out along a seasonally quiet M25, Michael impressed no one, and gave several food for unquiet thought by his general air of lassitude, and a lack of that flair which had marked him for discreet fame.

‘Under the weather, eh?' one of his cohorts suggested, with a knowing grin.

‘Roll on January,' another, more senior, exclaimed sourly.

Michael's mobile beeped softly, and Louise's voice buzzed in his ear. ‘A Nicki Lowther's been phoning for you. Says she wants you to get in touch with her, urgently. She sounds very upset about something.'

‘I don't know a Nicki Lowther,' he replied quietly. ‘In what connection?'

‘Private. That's all she said. But she was very insistent.' She gave him the number and rang off. An inner city location. He got away from his colleagues and found a chrome and upholstered chair in the bare outer lobby of the business centre. He stabbed out the number and identified himself when his call was answered.

The voice sounded young and extremely tense, unsteady with emotion. ‘I have to see you. Can we meet now? Right away? I need to talk.'

‘Look, I'm afraid I don't know what this is all about, er, Miss Lowther. I can't...'

‘I'm Stella's mate. Christmas Eve? You can't have forgotten, you bastard. I want to know just what you did to her.'

Scarcely knowing why, he found himself agreeing to drive over to the address she gave him, which was a penthouse apartment in former dockland. He recognised her at once when she opened the door to the luxury flat. She was wearing what appeared to be the same outfit he remembered; the black T-shirt and jeans and those ugly boots.

He realised as he entered that this was Stella Priest's pad, and he glanced about warily.

‘Don't worry,' Nicki Lowther said sarcastically. ‘There's no one else here. Stella's pissed off to Scotland again. She won't be back until New Year. I'm all alone. So you can have a go at me as well, if you want to.' Her jaw lifted and she glared at him with a childish defiance he found almost endearing.

Nicki Lowther's rather awkward, adolescent grace, and her gamine looks which bordered on the emaciated, had been her passport to a world far removed, at least socially and financially, from her humble North London background. Though even that background had itself contributed to her initial success, for her nasal London twang went along with the grungy image the commercial world was looking for then. Catalogue modelling clothes for a company who aped the more exclusive garments of the catwalks had been her first breakthrough assignment. Then came advertisements for a variety of goods, from wrist watches to sanitary napkins, all of which, the moguls decided, would do better if pushed by this fashionably urchin, unfulfilled look.

More and more people began to know her face, with its sulky pout and angular lines, though no one knew her name, and she soon got her chance to encroach on the outer edges of the really big money. She was taken on as a clothes-horse for a new name among the designers, an effete young man who was himself trying to achieve his own entrance into big-time. The show was in New York, and Nicki swung with great strides down the catwalk with some really famous names, dressed in the seemingly shapeless swirls of flimsy, semi-transparent materials, the thin straps slipping off her hollow shoulders, showing the pink little pimples of her almost flat breasts, the flowing femininity a striking contrast to the laced leather combat boots.

It was these blown up shots which Stella had first studied, when she was delving into the possibilities of
A Woman's Touch
, long before Felicity's name had even come up for the co-starring role. And it was Stella who got Nicki a small, but possibly seminal, part in the production. She had flirted with the youngster, seen the possibilities of a dalliance, before she had become diverted, then preoccupied, with the challenge of converting Felicity. Possibilities which were revived, then fanned rapidly into flame, when she and Felicity had broken their relationship at the beginning of December.

‘I gather you don't remember me,' Nicki grinned, when Michael had somewhat uneasily accepted the offer of a drink. He stood watching the vista of loury rainclouds from the panoramic sweep of the windows, and the tossing porcupine mastheads of the yachts in the choppy marina. ‘I was actually in
A Touch
,' she continued, ‘but I guess you were too busy watching your girl wrestling with Stella, eh?'

He frowned, summoning up his unpleasant manner at her aggressive style. ‘So what do you want to talk about?' he asked bluntly.

‘You. And what the fuck went on the other night at that poxy studio do. Did you shag her?'

Suddenly he wanted to hit out, to hurt her. And she looked so vulnerable, for all her bravado, that he knew he could. ‘Yes,' he answered. ‘I shagged her. After I put her head down the loo. And it wasn't rape. She bloody loved it, believe me! Whatever she might have snivelled on about afterwards.'

‘That's the trouble,' Nicki muttered, so forlornly that Michael was taken aback. ‘She didn't. She never said a word. But I knew something had happened. She hasn't been the same since.'

To Michael's surprise her head sank and her thin shoulders began to shake. She cried like a desolate child, and he felt his anger dissipate, felt the hollowness of his cheap victory.