Hers To Cherish (Verdantia Book 3) (12 page)

“Silence, Steffania.” His eyes flicked to the bedroom clock behind her. “You are to hold your position for another forty minutes.”

Ram must have
recognized the desperate plea in the wild flare of her eyes. He pursed his lips in thought. “I will shorten the time,” he said after several agonizing minutes.

She nodded vigorously
, and he laughed. “Don’t be so quick to agree. There is a price to be paid.”

She wrinkled her brow in question.

“I will shorten the time to ten more minutes but you will wear nipple clamps and a butt plug.”

Steffania slumped. Could she do that? But what choice did she have? She couldn’t endure another
forty minutes of her current predicament. She straightened and slowly nodded. Tears welled. A blink sent a drop cascading down.

Ram straightened from his chair and walked to the bed. When he turned
, he held a slender anal plug and nipple clamps. Tucked under his arm was a tube of lubricant. As he had done before, he played with her breasts until her nipples pulsed with feeling and then he clamped them.

Steffania couldn’t
restrain her soft whimpers of distress. She could deal with the pain. The insidious carnal stimulation that skipped alongside like a conjoined twin concerned her more. For the past few days, Ram had pushed her repeatedly to the heights of arousal – without release. Her state now was such that a whispered breath on her clit would trip her into a forbidden orgasm. Her tears flowed faster.

“
Lean over. Spread yourself.”

With a shuddering
groan, she complied. Ram’s fingers spread slick lubricant over the already tingling flesh surrounding her anus. An electric sensation speared through her as he inserted a well-lubed finger gently into her tight rear opening. He worked his finger slowly back and forth, loosening the tight clenching of her muscles, relaxing the tissue. As he did, Steffania moaned at the fearful pleasure. The effort not to rock into him, to deepen the insertion and scratch the insane itch from the nano-bots, sent her into convulsive shivers. Finally, the hard, blunt probe of the anal plug slipped inside. Taking his time, Ram rocked it further and further into her until the flared base rested against her buttocks. Steffania bit her lip almost bloody in the attempt to confine her whispered gratification and pleas for more.

“Stand
upright,” he ordered.

As she did so, Steffania
almost howled with the swamping arousal that clawed at her self-control – the
téad de ghrásta
ropes binding her, the ever-present, under-skin crawling sensation as the little bots scurried randomly around her labia, the devastating throb of the nipple clamps and now the fullness in her rectum. A sobbing moan escaped before she could prevent it. “Please,” she begged in a whisper. “I can’t.”

Ram stopped in front of her
. His dispassionate eyes raked her from head to toe. “My requirements remain the same. Silence. Hands on your thighs. Feet wide spread. Hold your position.”

With despair
, her tear-filled glance locked on Ramsey briefly and then she looked away, unwilling to let him read the defeat in her eyes. Ram’s firm hand tipped her face back up to him and he pressed a searching, gentle kiss on her mouth. “Do this for me, vixen,” he murmured against her lips.

“Yes
,
Dominus
,” Steffania whispered. And she did. In silence, she offered him her suffering.
I do this for you.
Ramsey’s eyes held hers the entire time. He never looked away.

He
didn’t make her wait a second longer than her ten-minute sentence. With broad sweeps of the amber solution, he quieted the insane tickling of the nano-bots and then removed the nipple clamps.

“You may relax your position. You may speak,” he said.

Steffania gasped out a fervent, “Thank you,” and brought her legs together. Once again, her thighs were slick with her body’s moisture. She rolled her shoulders in relief and gently pressed her tortured nipples, unable to stand even the slightest soothing movement, though it were even so gentle as a delicate swirl of air.

“Bend over. Spread your cheeks.”

She bent and held herself open for him, hissing at the crazy pleasure the slow glide of the anal toy produced as Ram removed it from her body.

“Straighten and stay there.”

Ram tossed the plug onto the bed then pulled her shaking body tightly to him, rubbing her shoulders and nuzzling soft kisses into the crook of her neck. His lean, hard body pressed warmth against her entire length. His engorged shaft slanted across the small of her back. Its heat radiated through the synth-leather of his pants. With quick movements, he stripped her of the
téad de ghrásta
until irregular loops of red cording lay at her feet.

“
You did well, vixen,” he murmured between kisses to her neck and shoulders.

Steffania didn’t know why those three words
, “
you did well
,” set off such a firestorm in her heart. But the wetness that had trickled down her cheeks for the past fifteen minutes became a flood and body-jerking sobs replaced her tense trembling.

Ram turned her into him
, holding her firmly. Steffania burrowed into his hard chest and wrapped her arms around him in a tight hug until she got herself under control. With a broad hand around the nape of her neck and his thumb under her jaw, he lifted her face to his. Steffania couldn’t mistake the approval on his face. “You give me vast pleasure, sweetheart.”

“Thank you
.”

A final, convulsive shudder ran through
Steffania and, to her immense surprise, Ram leaned down and picked her up in his arms. He placed her in the middle of the great bed and sent the black satchel, clamps, sex toys, lubricants, all of it, crashing to the floor with a broad sweep of his arm. Stripping his pants with equal disregard, he lay down between her legs, propping himself up on his elbows. His gaze wandered over her face as if he saw her for the first time and she felt his hands tracing the heavy gold collar embracing her neck. “The exquisite Steffania Rickard,” Ram murmured and leaned down and kissed her.

His lips and tongue gentled and seduced with a grace that made Steffania think of a lover, not a powerful
dominus
controlling his
slaaf
. Rolling to his side and taking her with him, Ram caressed and stroked the length of her body, igniting her glowing arousal, increasing the aching want between her legs. Ram pressed her to her back. His gentle hand slid down her abdomen and a thick finger ran between her swollen folds, then slipped into her narrow channel. With a low moan, Steffania rose into his hand, seeking more sensation. It felt beyond good.
Please don’t let him stop.
She must have whispered it aloud.

“
Yes, I know, sweetheart,” Ram said. He moved between her legs and slid his hard cock along her hot slit, finding the entrance to her molten core. “Find your pleasure, vixen.”

His initial plunge into her, stretching and filling her
aching, greedy pussy, almost sent her over, but Steffania fought back the climax that threatened to explode with every fiber in her.

“Not yet,” she
whimpered. “Not yet.”

With slow surges and even slower withdrawals, Ram’s rhythm set the match to a bonfire he had laid for the last few days.
Far too soon, the conflagration hit critical mass and with cries of, “No! No!” Steffania screamed her ecstasy into the room, arching underneath him in an agony of rapture she no longer had the strength to deny. Ramsey groaned low and clamped a hand viciously into her buttock cheek. He surged forward, driving himself deep within her and held himself implanted. An eternal moment of silence ensued. Submerged in the deep bedding, trapped underneath his collapsed weight, Steffania mumbled, “God, that was good, Ramsey.”

She felt the prod of his cock
still hilted within her when his low rumble of laughter answered her.

“We’re not through, vixen.”

It was either terribly late or terribly early before Ram finally let them sleep. After the third explosive orgasm, Steffania could honestly say she was no longer a participant. In the seconds before sleep claimed her, she realized one thing with certainty. Heartache loomed at the end of this mission. Leaving this man would be amazingly painful. Ramsey DeKieran totally ‘got’ her – and he totally got her off. And somewhere in all the morass of her emotions, she had given him more than her occasional obedience.

Veacon
Narr stood observing the “quiet room” with his head scientist, Dr. Tain Nissler. He laughed to himself at his play on words.
Yes, the good doctor definitely works on heads.
The white, sterile space contained five rows of twelve oblong, stainless-steel, “clam-shells” big enough to contain a person. Each cerebral probe capsule contained a whimpering, writhing, keening victim. Multi-strand wires led from the needles inserted under the skin of a victim’s head to holographic monitors while the rest of their body lay strapped down, spread-eagled and nude.

The holographs of nightmare scenarios flickered like bad movies at the head of each box. All the victims in the nightmares were women – beautiful, beautiful women.
Silence cloaked the room but for an occasion thump from one of the coffin-like containers. Occasionally a capsule rocked slightly from the turbulent movement within.

“I am extremely pleased with your work
to create the ideal
slaaf
, Dr. Nissler. I think you and your staff have almost perfected the procedure.”

“Thank you,
Dominus
Narr.” The wiry, nervous man grimaced and slipped his ever-present datapad underneath his arm. “Initially, we lost some product due to the overzealous application of the cerebral probes, but I hope the units our ‘quiet room’ produces now more than cover your early losses.” The doctor stretched his neck in the tight collar of his starched white medical coat and shifted from foot to foot. The man’s patent unease in his presence amused Narr.

“You got that other issue resolved?” Narr
’s eyes returned to scanning the “quiet room”. “The spy in our midst?”

The doctor cleared his throat. “
“Yes, yes, that…ah
...
technician will no longer be a
problem.” Nissler cleared his throat once more.

Narr’s gaze remained on the CP apparatus. “Purely out of curiosity, what did you do with the man? Will I be required to hide a body?”

“Ah, no...no. We didn’t kill him.”

Irregular thumps shook a CP bed toward the corner of the room and Narr’s gaze fell to the doctor’s. A smile crept across his face and he chuckled. “
Is that our man?”

Nissler ran one hand through his hair and then scrubbed his face. “It seemed
tidier than killing him.” Nissler’s gaze caught Narr’s. “When the program finishes running, he won’t be able to feed himself, much less remember his own name. He’ll be effectively neutralized – no threat to us.”    

Narr nodded his head in approval.
Using CP
machines to alter or affect behavior carried a death sentence imposed by GAPS, the Galactic Agency for the Protection of Sentients. But who was going to tell them? Certainly not his lovely
slaaf,
nor their purchasers. Owning a CP-altered sentient carried a mandatory sentence of ten years hard labor on the outer-rim mining asteroids.

“Do we have all sixty
CP shells filled?” Narr said.

“Yes,
Dominus
, all the machines are in use.”

“Are you having fun with the latest delivery, Dr. Nissler?”

Narr
stopped to watch a holographic picture at the head of one stainless-steel bed. Tens of large snake-like tentacles protruded from a lovely blonde’s vagina, nipples, eyes and temples. Bulges of skin rippled and then tentacles sprouted from her abdomen. The holographic woman’s mouth contorted in hysterical screams of terror before a tentacle sprouted from it, too. Narr shivered in revulsion and then opened the viewing door on the top of the stainless-steel bullet. The woman within was the same as the holograph’s victim, but the living woman within stared in glazed horror at nothing, her mouth drawn back in a silent rictus of terror
.