Page 76 of Dominion's Guard
He works lower. The flogger catches the backs of my thighs, and my hips press forward against the cross. The wood is hard against my pubic bone, smooth and unyielding, and the pressure is maddening because it is almost enough friction and nowhere close. I grind against the beam, searching for contact, and Andy's free hand lands flat against my hip and stills me.
"Patience," he says.
"Patience is your department."
"Tonight it's yours too."
He brings the flogger across the backs of my thighs in a strike that is harder than the ones before. The leather wraps the curve of my thigh and the tips catch my inner thigh, close enough to my center that the rush of blood makes me clench around nothing. My inner thighs are slick. The arousal has been building with each strike, each sting translating into a pulse between my legs that is rhythmic and relentless, and I can feel the wetness on my skin when the air hits it.
"You're wet." His voice is behind me, low enough that only I can hear it. "I can see it on your thighs."
"If you could stop narrating and start finishing, that would be helpful."
"You don't give the orders tonight." His mouth grazes the back of my neck, and the softness of it after the leather is so disorienting that my knees go liquid. "And you're going to be wetter before I'm done."
He brings the flogger up between my thighs from behind. The stroke is measured, a controlled upward flick, and the leather falls catch the aching lips of my cunt with a sting that is so precise and so intimate that what tears out of my mouth is nota number or a word. It is a raw, desperate cry that I have never given any Dom at any time in this building. The sting converts to a throb instantly, the sensitized flesh pulsing with a heat indistinguishable from arousal, and my thighs are shaking. My wrists pull against the cuffs, not to escape but because my body needs to grab something, to anchor itself, and there is nothing to grab.
"There you are," he says, and the two words are quieter than anything he's said all night.
He brings the flogger between my legs again, lighter this time. The leather strands drag across slick flesh with a slow precision, individual falls catching my clit, parting me, trailing through the wetness that is coating the leather by now. He flicks upward again, letting the tips snap against the tight, aching bud, and my vision narrows to a single point. He does it again, harder, and the sting is bright and blinding and it translates to pleasure so fast that the two sensations collapse into a single wave.
The orgasm is right there, coiling in my pelvis, tightening in my thighs, gathering in the muscles of my stomach like a fist closing. One more stroke, one more flick of the falls against me, and I will shatter on this cross in front of the east side of the main floor.
He stops.
The flogger drops to his side. The air on my heated, soaked skin feels like ice. My body clenches and releases and clenches again, the orgasm suspended at the crest with nowhere to fall, and the denial is so sharp and so cruel that what comes out of me borders on a sob.
"Andy." My voice is destroyed. "If you don't finish what you started, I will find a way out of these cuffs and I will end you."
His mouth is at my ear, his body pressed against my back, and I can feel him hard against my ass, the thick length of himstraining against his leather pants. He's wrecked too. That's the only thing keeping me from committing actual homicide.
"I'm going to finish," he says. "Not here."
He unbuckles the wrist cuffs with steady hands. When my arms come down, the blood rushing back into my fingers is a secondary sensation behind the pulse between my legs that is still hammering with the denied orgasm. He reaches behind him to the bench where he staged his supplies before the scene and wraps a robe around my shoulders, the terry cloth soft on my overly sensitized and flushed skin.
He guides me off the platform, and when my knees buckle on the second step, he doesn't wait for me to recover. He sweeps me up, one arm under my knees, the other around my back, and cradles me against his chest as if I weigh nothing. The robe falls open and I can't bring myself to fix it. My face presses into the curve of his neck, and I can feel his pulse against my lips, steady and strong where mine is still racing.
He carries me through the lounge toward the stairs. Members glance and look away with the practiced courtesy the floor extends. I am grateful for the discretion because I have been stripped bare in ways that have nothing to do with clothes.
His arms don't shift on the climb. The stairs don't slow him. The denied orgasm is still pulsing between my legs, a slow, insistent ache, and the heat of his body against mine and the scent of his skin and the way he holds me like I am both fragile and his make the ache worse in ways I refuse to examine right now.
Andy must have booked a private room on the upper floor, one of the smaller spaces with low lighting, a bed with clean sheets, and a door that locks from the inside. I have avoided these rooms for years because they felt like boxes.
Tonight I am choosing trust over witnesses.
19
RENATA
The door closes behind us. The lock clicks. The ambient noise from the main floor drops to a low vibration through the walls, and the quiet wraps around us like a second room inside the first.
Andy sets me down on my feet, and the carpet is soft after the hardwood of the platform. My legs hold. Barely. The robe is still hanging open and I still can't bring myself to fix it, because the woman who let a man carry her through a crowded club in a robe she didn't bother to close is not the same woman who tied her apron hours ago.
I turn to face him. His gaze drops the length of my body, from my flushed breasts to the wetness still gleaming on my inner thighs and climbs back up. The hunger in his expression is banked and patient and absolute.
"You look very proud of yourself," I tell him. "For a man whose hands haven't stopped shaking either."
His jaw tightens by a fraction. I caught the tell he didn't want me to see, and the fact that I'm reading him while I'm standing here flushed and trembling and soaked from a flogger he wielded tells him exactly what kind of woman he chose to put on that cross.
