Leah's Punishment Read online

  Merek turned sharply back to Asgal. 'Get out!' He manhandled him through the doorway and sent him crashing down the stairs. Then he came back for Leah.

  Ean surged forward: 'Don't touch her!'

  'Out of my way, boy . . .' Merek raised his arm, threatening to strike the young groom.

  'No!' Leah cried out. And this was the final betrayal for Merek, who immediately struck Ean down. Then he bundled his fickle possession under his arm and left.

  6

  An Infusion of Pleasure

  Ean stared dejectedly across the carriage at his mistress. In the lodge she had helped him up from the floor, though he had not needed assistance. He tried to return her smile now but could not. The unsteadiness that had caused him to trip was simply the shock at being attacked by Leah's master when all he had done was intervene to save her from his unwarranted and ill-directed wrath. On Lady Lauren's instruction Kapler had blocked the doorway to prevent Ean from going after them.

  His heart still pounded. So many emotions in so short a time . . . He could not get Leah out of his mind. Until yesterday he had scarcely gone further than kissing a girl; then his mistress had beguiled him. And now he had met Leah. She was so beautiful – even those blemishes were like precious maculae on her soft white skin; she was angelic and warm and yet so sexual, inflaming him with a passion he had not guessed existed. He could not put aside that vision of the pleading in her tearful eyes as she had begged her master not to harm him – a slave-girl putting herself at cruel risk to come to his defence. He had never known such selfless kindness – not from any girl, not from anyone. When he thought of that, the emotion threatened to engulf him.

  His mistress was staring at him with a concerned expression. 'Ean, come here and sit beside me.' Kapler tactfully turned to look out of the window into the night. Ean half-heartedly moved across. Her hand took his but she did not speak further. Perhaps she understood something of his inner turmoil.

  He had earlier asked to be allowed to drive the carriage, saying the fresh air would clear his mind, but Lady Lauren had refused. She too was concerned about him. She drew his head lightly to her slender shoulder and, closing his eyes, he breathed the beautiful scent of her hair. He had never felt so warmly cocooned in female protection as he did tonight. He took the hand that had been holding his and quietly raised its fingertips to his lips: the soft musky scent and taste of Leah still lay deliciously upon them. His mistress shivered as he very gently sucked her fingertips. He wanted to search out ways of arousing women, in gratitude for the luscious feelings they aroused in him. His mistress was beautiful too. He felt his flesh stirring, then the warmth of her other hand upon his trousered thigh, moulding protectively around the growing bulge. It remained there until the carriage drew up outside the mansion.

  Ean, self-conscious about his very obvious state of arousal, at first remained still. When he did attempt to move, his mistress knowingly held him back and nodded to Kapler, who got out and went in the direction of the stables.

  'I don't want you going to your quarters in this state,' his mistress whispered. She put her hand across his brow. 'You seem feverish. You shall sleep in the house tonight. My husband is away, so you shall have his bedroom.' Her eyes met his and calmly held off his questioning gaze. 'Should your condition worsen in the night, the servants are to hand. My husband would wish it.' Still her gaze did not falter.

  'Very well, mistress,' Ean whispered.

  'Lauren . . . You must call me that while we are in the house.'

  The power of suggestion is strongest when the recipient conspires with the perpetrator. Ean did not want to rebuff the attentions of his handsome mistress. She directed the servants to prepare him a soothing bath. It lulled him almost to sleep and once the servants were gone his mistress returned. She sat by the bath, watching him through the wisps of steam until the water had turned tepid. 'Shall I ring for more hot water?' she asked.

  'No, mistr . . . No, Lauren – thank you,' he answered softly.

  'Then you are ready?'

  'Yes.' He felt his heartbeat quicken at the possible underlying meaning of her words.

  'Ah, but not quite ready . . .' She rolled her sleeves. 'Kneel up, Ean.' She poured perfumed oil into her palm and slowly and methodically spread it all over her fingers. His erection was building even before she clasped his penis and worked its foreskin back and forth with a slippery pressure that made the arousal almost unbearable. Her other hand caressed his buttocks; her fingers sought the crease; within a second, her oily thumb was inside, pressing against the wall of flesh behind the root of his penis. Ean shuddered and almost ejaculated as the thumb-pressure was maintained while his foreskin was stretched back, shinily tight, and simply held. He felt as if his glans would burst through it. He heard Lauren's breathing – deep but very slow and controlled – and she too was trembling. Then she raised her chin and murmured: 'Kiss me, Ean. But do not let the semen come. Control it. Learn to keep it in until I decide the time is ripe. Now, kiss slowly.'

  Her lips were soft and small and brushed against his in little wisps of desire as her thumb pressed its delicious torture against his seminal gland, keeping it on the brink of convulsion. Ean gasped against her lips and then she drew back to look with pride and delight at what she was doing. 'When your coming threatens, I can feel the gland inside you start to pulse against my thumb,' she whispered. 'But it has not swelled enough as yet. We need to make it bigger – more swollen with delicious come. There – did you feel that little push against my thumb? Now kiss again.' The softness and pleasure of Lauren's renewed kissing almost tipped the gland into convulsion. Very slowly she eased the tight pressure on his foreskin before carefully withdrawing her thumb. Then she helped him from the bath and proceeded to dry him in fragrant towels. 'Good boy – it's staying hard. Turn sideways – put your hands behind you. Let Lauren look. Mmm . . . It's quite lovely like that. Some say it's the test of a man – how long he can keep an erection. I prefer to think of it as the test of the woman.' She then led him by his penis to her husband's bedroom.

  Lauren's slender fingers collared his aroused flesh with such a delicate squeezing rippling pressure that the feeling of wanting to come was ever-present. She kept hold until she had turned back the covers and made him sit on the side of the bed. Then she put her hand across his forehead again and said: 'There is still fever . . . Do you feel faint?' Ean shook his head weakly. He felt drained of all ordinary strength yet brimming with desire and emotion. 'Open your knees.' She slid both hands around his sac, enclosing it very gently. 'You're hot here too.' The sides of her fingers, pressing into the sensitive angles of his groin, made him gasp softly as his erection stood harder than ever. Lauren bent forward, kissed his nipples, then gently took them in turn between her teeth. The finger pressure at the tops of his inner thighs continued; his sac tightened to a ball, which she clasped tightly as the nipple-nipping torture by her teeth continued. When Lauren finally drew back there was a globule of clear liquid at the tip of Ean's penis. 'Only a small escape – that's good,' she crooned. She sipped it swiftly and looked up at him with its glaze upon her lips. Then she kissed him through his murmured protests, smearing his own salty glaze over his lips – chiding him softly: 'Yes, you must have it, else how can you hope to know what a girl feels when she tastes you?' – while her fingers found the buried tubes feeding from his tightened ball sac and squeezed them expertly, cruelly, until his murmurs turned to gasps. She drew back again and admired his trembling, seeping erection. 'You must lie down, now, Ean. The strain has been great. I shall bring a preparation to quell the fever and to help you sleep.'

  In the kitchens, Lauren took great care with the preparation of the infusion, selecting from her secret store only the fattest, firmest and greenest of the special seed cases, so remarkable in their properties – miraculous, some would have it, though Lauren, being more pragmatic, ascribed their ecstatic effects to hallucination rather than mystical intervention. Whatever the cause, the upshot was potent. She cr
ushed the cases carefully with the opal pestle, tipped the precious debris into the little copper pot of boiled water and returned it very briefly to the fire. As soon as the bubbles appeared she removed it, stirred it with a stick of juniper and watched the pale blue colour appear and slowly deepen. The aromatic scent of juniper filled her nostrils. She then put the concoction aside to cool while she went to bathe.

  Once there, she thought of her young groom – aroused, his sleep surely held at bay by his body's yearning – still lying in her husband's bed, awaiting her return. And she thought of that other yearning she had once induced, that long time past, within her first full lover. He was a soldier, a captain, an acquaintance of her father's, though her father, a man of title, would certainly have prohibited the liaison had he ever found it out. Prior to that, Lauren's only experiences were of mutual discovery with her female cousin; but even that had swiftly taught her how to suffer pleasure and how to give it. And the girl-talk had nurtured her inquisitiveness about men.

  Her captain was her elder by fifteen years. He knew enough not to attempt anything under her father's roof but in the event he knew little else, certainly nothing about girls beyond the basest attack, like a creature of the fields. Even so, for Lauren, there were aspects that were deeply thrilling – the clandestine meeting at the quiet inn, the first baring of her body before a man, the first fumbling fingerings, the primal sexuality of penetration by hot male flesh – her own nearness of pleasure when her captain had groaned and her body had felt his pumping start. After the swift withdrawal she had watched the white glutinous issue pulsing out – large quantities, as if he had been storing it up – coming hot against her naked sex, burning her taunted clitoris, scorching her soul.

  For Lauren the experience was at once pleasurable yet acutely unfulfilling. Her soldier lover looked intensely pleased and replete. But Lauren knew there was much more to be undertaken by the sufficiently brave and willing. Though he was by far her senior and appeared knowledgeable and accomplished – organising the secret rendezvous, giving secure instructions to the servants at the inn, receiving deference from the landlord; in fact, seemingly controlling all that befell – nevertheless it was Lauren who had seduced her captain: she was here in this bed by her own design and now she would bend him to her bidding.

  With the covers drawn back, the vision of her slim nudity held him fast. She lay sprawled just as he had left her, her lips open, her breathing heavy, her small nipples erect, her thighs nakedly apart, a dense pool of his semen still warm upon her engorged sex, her clitoris still yearning. She kept her eyes fixed upon him as she sighed and moaned and dipped her fingertips into the pool and touched herself within and without, and all round the hard bud of her clitoris, inciting her arousal very slowly. The newness of this sensation of slippery warm semen coating her fingers made this means of arousal exquisite – the sliding against that shiny knot of flesh, the soft slither of her labia through her fingers. At her climax, her gaze slewed sideways, her belly cramped uncontrollably, she cried out loud and almost fainted under that beautiful feeling.

  And then her captain was upon her once more, plunging in through the tightness of her inexperienced vagina now rendered so slippery, shoving up to the very hilt and spurting new semen deep inside her. Again he withdrew too swiftly, not knowing what she needed, perhaps not caring over-deeply. But her tightness as he pulled out kept the semen within her. A soft throbbing now taunted the entrance to her womb. All between her legs still felt swollen: that single climax was insufficient to her needs. But she kept her thighs firmly closed, kept that swollen feeling in. And as he lay abed, asleep, Lauren caressed him, kissed his back and snuggled close and – though much was missing from this liaison – felt powerful warmth for what this first experience with a man represented.

  In the early hours, her desire was so compelling that she sat up. Her captain lay asleep on his front: she drew back the sheet and ran her fingers down his muscular back. He murmured but did not stir. One by one she traced the bumps of his spine; near the base was one more prominent than the rest – perhaps from an old injury in battle, she surmised. On an impulse, Lauren mounted him. She spread her thighs about him as if he were an animal she was riding and she rode his buttocks, rode his little bump with her own knot rubbing right against it. He woke but curiously did not resist: he simply raised his buttocks slightly to free his swelling erection. Lauren thrust all her weight against him, trapping his erection under his belly. And very soon she felt his shuddering come. It was as if she could feel his pulsing thrumming against her clitoris through the very knob of his spine. Her second orgasm came more powerfully than the first and kept coming until she felt the hot stored semen pouring out of her and soaking generously into the cleft of his buttocks. Slowly, studiously, Lauren worked it up his bottom, using her fingers, until, pressing inside against the root of his penis, she felt him shed another shuddering moan. Then she collapsed forwards against his back, satiated now, her teeth biting his shoulder and her nipples poking into him like little stones.

  Such was Lauren's first experience with a man. By next day her captain was chastened. She did not renew their contract of secret meeting; there was no purpose to a reunion; he would remember her well enough from that single calling. Her husband, on their wedding night, had dubbed her playfully a 'nymph of desire' and she had answered, 'Yes my lord, you have it right – neither wife nor mistress.' He had taken her reply as jest but what she had spoken portended a truth: Lauren remained her own mistress, subservient to nobody.

  After bathing, Lauren donned her bed-jacket and dressing-gown, returned to the kitchens, strained the infusion into a cup and carried it to her husband's bedroom, where her young groom had drawn the thin sheet over himself and now lay on his side, soundlessly asleep. Lauren placed the cup carefully on the bedside table and seated herself quietly beside and behind him on the bed. She sat for many minutes simply looking at him – his broad strong shoulders, his narrow waist, his youthful face – before she touched him, the tips of her fingers gently brushing the tousled hair from the side of his face. He murmured one word, 'Leah . . .', and turned on to his back, still asleep. Lauren bent over him and kissed him very softly on the lips. Her hand came to rest against his thigh, where the erection still burgeoned strongly. She closed her fingers round it through the sheet and when he murmured she put little kisses upon his lower lip until his eyes flickered open.

  'Mistress . . .,' he gasped.

  'Lauren . . .,' she whispered. Then she frowned. 'You were anxious, in your sleep, fretting, trying to cry out.'

  'Was I? I cannot recollect . . .'

  'No matter – it's the fever. Sit up and drink this. It will calm you.'

  Ean drank the bitter contents thirstily and trustingly, oblivious of their potency. 'Drink it all,' Lauren whispered, 'every drop.' Her gown had fallen open and her jacket was unfastened. He was staring at her breasts. She wanted to bury his face against them and have his lips softly searching by blind feel for her nipples and for the soft undersides and for the musk she was making under her arms. When a man did that to her, the sensation was primordial, sublime.

  'Lie down now, Ean – rest.' Again she laid her cupped palm against his erect penis through the thinness of the sheet. She wanted to leave it in that state of tauntedness, unable to deflate, while the potion spun its web and he became a living prisoner in its world of special dreaming.

  A short while later he was breathing steadily in a deep, unmoving sleep. Lauren drew back the sheet, slid a supple, watertight sheath over his swollen penis and tied it off under his sac. He did not move – nor could he, through the efficacy of the potion – but the sheath would capture any emissions that enraptured dreaming might provoke. Lauren covered him again and left him.

  7

  A Dream Shared

  In the early hours Lauren returned to her husband's bedroom, where her young groom now lay in a state of semi-torpidity. This time she locked the door behind her, precluding any chance – however
slight – of interruption. Sufficient time had elapsed for the drug to have infused its peculiar potency into his inexperienced body, and she knew that the first time always proved to be the most heady and compelling. Already her heart was thumping, her mind was racing – what pleasures lay in store? She removed her dressing-gown, leaving herself completely nude apart from her short bed-jacket.

  Ean lay exactly as she had left him. He at first appeared serene, until she came closer. In fact his whole body was trembling, as if a bolt of lightning was passing through it, or as if he were a creature impaled alive. His lips were moving ever so slightly. Lauren leant across and touched her lips very lightly to his: there was no reaction other than the continued trembling. She kissed his brow and felt a genuine fever that had not existed before he had taken the drug. She drew back the sheet; his handsome erection stood harder than ever, proudly arching, swelling against the constriction of the thin sheath. Lauren untied the sheath very gently and began gently furling it back; the seal was gradually yielding; the shaft glistened with warm exudation; the scent of juniper filled her nostrils. She lowered her lips very softly to the freshly exposed base of the shaft and sucked the hot glistening undersurface, compressing the undertube in rhythmic sucks, pumping it like a slow heartbeat, tasting in the exuded moisture the slightly bitter suffusion from the drug, and feeling her own excitement quickening to an almost audible pulsing in her throat. She heard him murmur then moan: he was waking. When she sat up, he opened his eyes and tried to take in his surroundings. 'Where am I?' he mumbled. 'Where's Leah?' he suddenly shouted and sat bolt upright, shaking violently.

  'Shh . . .' Lauren, her bed-jacket completely open, held him, breast to naked breast. 'Shh . . . my darling, you were dreaming – crying out, so I came to you.' She kissed his naked neck and felt the thudding pulse against her lips. Then she drew back and kissed him fully on the mouth.