He moved out of the way and I quickly knelt down and slipped backwards under the desk. Fortunately, it was a huge mahogany thing with a front: I’d be invisible under there.
“Pull your skirt up,” he whispered, looking down at me. I quickly dragged it up around my waist, exposing my stocking tops and panties. His voice was harsh with lust now. “I want you to play with yourself while you’re doing it,” he told me – an idea that was so filthy it lifted me almost to the edge on its own. Then he was sliding his chair forward, until his legs and groin were right underneath the desk. I quickly reached for his fly: I figured I’d better do that before whoever was outside came in. It was dark, now that he’d moved forward, but I unzipped the zip and freed him from his jockey shorts. He was already hard, and from down there the thick shaft looked even bigger.
“Enter!” he called, and I heard the door creak open. God, we were really doing this! I was going to suck him while he had his meeting. I leant forward, planting one hand on the floor for support and wrapped the other around his shaft. He was hot and hard under my touch.
“What’s on your mind?” I heard Jagor ask.
I opened my mouth wide and closed my lips around the head, sealing him in my mouth. I’d done this for boyfriends in the past, but I’d never really enjoyed it. It had felt like a duty, more than anything. Now, though, it felt right: I wanted to give him pleasure. My tongue swirled gently around the head.
“Lucy Snow, Your Highness,” came the reply.
Medenko.
I froze there, Jagor’s cock in my mouth, my breath hot against his thighs, my ears straining. Then I felt the tip of one of Jagor’s polished shoes tap me, very gently, on my stockinged leg. He wanted me to continue.
Expected
me to continue.
I continued.
“What about Lucy?” he asked amiably.
“It’s not right, her being here, Your Highness. I never approved of this: she’s far too close to you, for an outsider.”
My insides tightened. Did Jagor realize that Medenko suspected? I didn’t stop, this time: I took him a little deeper in, and started to suck.
“Close?” Jagor shifted in his chair, and I imagined him leaning forward, elbows on the table. “How close do you think she is?” There was a warning edge to his voice.
“I wasn’t suggesting that anything had happened, Your Highness,” Medenko said, treading very carefully.
I started to stroke the shaft with one hand, making sure I didn’t make any noise. God, he was so hard! I couldn’t feel him like this and not imagine him inside me.
“Good,” said Jagor, his voice almost a rumble. “Because that would be a serious allegation. To even suggest that I was sleeping with Lucy....”
“Of course not, Your Highness,” said Medenko. “That was the furthest thing from my mind.” His voice was like syrup. “I was merely voicing what others, who don’t know you as well as I, might think.”
I felt Jagor’s shoe delicately stroke my bare thigh and come to rest on the front of my panties. I hadn’t forgotten his instruction, but...God, with Medenko sitting just a few feet from me? The fear of being caught was mingling with a building wave of heat, the two feeding each other. The foot prodded, gently but insistent. I took a deep breath, the air hissing around the hard length of him. Then I slipped my other hand down between my legs, letting him feel my fingers as they slipped into my panties. The foot withdrew.
“Go on,” said Jagor – apparently aimed at both of us. I started to stroke myself with one hand. I was already wet.
“She is very attractive, Your Highness.”
“Oh, you think so?” That warning edge in his voice, again. I was still sucking, my mouth hot and tight around him, my hand stroking faster now.
“I wasn’t meaning—I meant, one might notice that—” Medenko backpedalled furiously.
“No, no,” Jagor told him. “I insist, Medenko. Please. Tell me why you think my aide is so attractive.” His voice wasn’t cruel: it was playful. My eyes widened. He wasn’t really going to have this conversation, was he?”
Medenko relented: I could almost imagine him blushing – almost. I wished I could see his face. “People might notice that she has...very pleasing legs, Your Highness.”
Really? My legs? I’d never thought of them like that. But hearing him say it, hearing them discuss me in such blatantly sexual terms, was causing the heat inside me to build faster and faster. I stroked Jagor hard now, my hand pumping up and down. I let the head slip from my mouth and rested my cheek on his warm thigh, kissing the side of the shaft as I stroked.
“And what of the rest of her, Medenko?”
“People might notice her breasts, Your Highness. Especially in the blouses you had your dresser buy for her.”
“Yes, they are rather nice, aren’t they?” Jagor mused. I hissed out hot, angry breath around his shaft: I was outraged that he’d talk about me in that way, and immensely turned on. My fingers were sliding between my folds now, and it was difficult not to groan.
Medenko was starting to relax, now: it was boy talk, bantering with his friend. “Lovely lips.”
I could almost see Jagor tilting his head to one side. Raising his eyebrows. “Oh?”
“Yes, they—” Medenko suddenly broke off, realizing he’d gone too far.
Under the desk, I pumped Jagor’s cock furiously and slipped my mouth over the end again. Two fingers were inside me, and I was rubbing the crook of my hand against my clit. I was rapidly careening towards the edge, partially because I had a pretty good idea what Medenko was going to say.
“Go on,” Jagor told him.
“No, nothing, Your Highness,” Medenko said quickly.
“No, please,” Jagor insisted. “Tell me about Lucy’s lips.”
Medenko hummed and hawed for a few seconds, but eventually said in a rush, “It is difficult to talk to her, Your Highness, and not imagine one’s cock between them.”
This man I’d been so scared of, who ruled the retinue with an iron fist, had spent every meeting wanting me. When he’d talked to me alone in Monaco, rattling me badly about what he might know about Jagor and me, he’d actually been thinking about me sucking him. I didn’t know whether to be humiliated that he thought of me in that way, or turned on by it. I’d never realized that I had that sort of power over men. The revelation left me teetering on the edge, and then Jagor pushed me over.
“I don’t think that’s at all appropriate, Medenko. Might I remind you that Miss Snow is our honored guest and my personal aide.” His foot tapped my leg again: three times, fast. Telling me to go faster. Being ordered like that while I was wearing a slave collar...the significance wasn’t lost on me. As I stroked him faster, his length throbbing and ready under my touch, as my tongue lashed over and around the head, he said, “Lucy is my aide: nothing more and nothing less. She is here because I want her here, and you and everyone else need no more explanation that that. She’s a fine, upstanding woman and she’d be horrified by some of the things you’re suggesting. Let me assure you, she’s nothing but a consummate professional.”
And suddenly I was coming, hot clenching spasms that I couldn’t voice, that I had to bottle up tight and let explode silently within me. At the same time Jagor was shooting into my mouth, and I swallowed quickly, until he was still under my lips. I slowly drew my head off him and rested my cheek on his thigh. I’d never felt so at ease, or so shell-shocked. It was like staring at one of those illusions with the two black faces, where you suddenly see the inverse and glimpse the white candlestick between them. I’d been thinking of slaves as women forced and suffering. I hadn’t been seeing it through Asterian eyes, in a land where sex wasn’t evil or dirty. It was the women who chose their master, who had every man lusting after them. Viewed that way, they – I – was the one with the power.
***
When Medenko had gone, and I’d crawled out from under the desk – flushed, panting, with my skirt up around my waist – Jagor took me in his arms again. As I wrapped myself around him, I could feel the collar, the thin fabric between our necks. I was gaining an appreciation for the subtleties of it now. Having a collar – as opposed to a ring or an armband – meant you felt it whenever you moved, and especially when you went to embrace someone. You couldn’t forget what you were.
***
I spent the rest of the day in the guise of a palace slave, working for the Prince. Subtly different to being
his
slave, and utterly alien to me.
I walked behind him through every doorway. I sat – or in one case, knelt – until I was needed. There was nothing overtly sexual, but I could feel Jagor’s eyes stroking me when he had the chance. Most of the time, though, I was sitting beside him: it was the eyes of the other men we met that took in my business suit, my bowed head and my palace collar.
In some ways it was normal – when we had a working lunch, I ate. When Jagor needed help with translation or had some question regarding the UN, I assisted. The rest of the time, I sat quietly. I served coffee a few times, but then I’d done that in the US, as the youngest or least experienced person in the room – sometimes, even, because I’d been a woman. In fact, thinking back to those experiences, this was in some ways much less disturbing. In those meetings, as an office junior, men had looked at my body and used it to judge me as a person: if I had a short skirt on, I must be an easy lay; if it was a long skirt, I was frigid, and either way I was a woman and so lousy at my job. Here, sex and work were separate: the men could appreciate my looks without letting it cloud anything else. As soon as I translated or offered an opinion, they treated me with the same respect they’d give a man.
At least, the Asterian men did.
Towards the end of the day, we met with an all-male Russian delegation, and I translated while watching them letch quite openly over me. When it was over, the Russian diplomat told me – he didn’t speak
to
me, just told me what to tell the Prince – how much he liked the subservience of Asterian women, and how he wished they behaved so in Russia. He’d misunderstood Asteria in the same way I had.
None of them would choose you,
I thought darkly, even as I translated his words.
It only sank in later that, the entire day, no one had questioned that I was Asterian.
Chapter Nine
A week passed like that. It was difficult to grab time alone with Jagor: with the King in hospital, he worked long hours dealing with trade and labor problems – the palladium mines were so critical to the country’s economy, any problem had to be dealt with immediately. I accompanied him as a slave to meetings in the day, treasuring the slightest touch – the way he’d let his leg brush mine in an elevator, or lean over my shoulder to check a document I was working on, close enough that I could feel his warmth. We were never alone.
Then, on the fourth day, he had a phone call with the French president. We were alone in his study, and halfway through the call he pushed back from his desk and motioned me atop him. Silently, I unzipped his trousers and rolled a condom onto him. I lifted my skirt, pushed my panties to one side and slowly lowered myself onto him, biting my lip as he filled me to keep from crying out. I rode him with tiny, delicate movements: no more than an inch of motion. He undid my blouse, pushed up my bra and palmed my breasts, the phone cradled in his shoulder. We had to move so slowly and quietly, it lasted half an hour, and when my climax broke, it made me shudder and gasp so hard that he had to clamp his hand over my mouth.
In the second week, the King came home. He was a huge, jolly man – Jagor’s build but a little softer around the edges. He had a thick, pointed beard and a booming laugh; I liked him immediately.
With his father home, Jagor relaxed a little more – the statesman disappeared and the playboy returned. He was as eager as I was for things to resume. With both of us in Asteria, though, I wasn’t sure when that would be. One night around nine, when we were alone for a moment in a corridor, he suddenly grabbed me and pushed me face-first up against the wall, kissing my neck just above the collar. I went from zero to sixty in no seconds flat; I was red-faced and panting, his huge hands cupping my ass through my tight skirt, my nipples hard as they rasped against the wall under my thin blouse. “We can’t!” I hissed. “Someone will come!”
“I need to be alone with you,” he told me.
“I know!”
He hesitated. “There’s a place. Somewhere the bodyguards don’t go.”
“Where?” If he’d said Antarctica, I would have leapt in a plane with him.
“There’s a club...a sex club. Very discreet, but—”
“What?”
“To the people inside, you’d be there as my slave. Are you ready for that?”
I thought for a few seconds. It was this, or perhaps not be alone with him again for weeks, maybe until we left Asteria. And who knew when that would be? “I’m ready.”
***
Jagor faked an urgent phone call, and we drove there with two of the bodyguards. It was past ten when we arrived. I’d been expecting a neon sign and a dark doorway, but we stopped outside a modern skyscraper.
“Stay in the car,” he told the bodyguards and, for once, they let him go in unaccompanied. I went to follow him. “You too, Lucy,” he told me. “I don’t need you for this.” And he was gone, striding confidently inside the building.
I was completely lost. What the hell was going on? “Is he safe in there, alone?” I asked Arno. He was my favorite of all the bodyguards: more talkative than the rest of them.
“Hendel – he owns the building – has his own security. Doesn’t let anyone else in but his guests, even us. He’s obsessed with privacy. He screens visitors probably better than we do.”
“What is it?” I asked, looking up at the green glass tower.
“Hendel imports luxury goods. Alcohol, mainly. Things you can’t get in Asteria. There’s a private bar in there, too, and a club, in the basement. The rich go there.”