“That sounds very effective,” he said.
“If you’d like to learn a few tricks to make the taming easier, perhaps we can arrange a pet play-date. I could give you some training pointers to use on Pani.”
Bach patted her bottom again, then rubbed. Realizing that she wasn’t about to be spanked again, Pani relaxed beneath his caresses. Very hesitantly, she spread her legs to give him better access, catching her breath as he obligingly shifted his hand between her bare bottom cheeks.
“I suppose I could use some pointers,” he said, smiling as she let go of his leg to reach beneath herself. Before his eyes, she stroked between her own thighs with trembling fingertips, parting the folds of her narrow sex and holding them open for him.
“Call me tomorrow,” Bach heard himself say, and for the life of him, he couldn’t say whether Ralhan got a chance to reply before he terminated the call.
Pani lay as if frozen on his lap, hardly even seeming to breathe as she held herself open to him. Soft, wet and pink, like the petals of a flower unfurled, she waited for him.
Once more, Bach smoothed his hands over her body, stroking down her shoulders to her back, to the round, battered flesh of her buttocks, and her tense and widely spread thighs. She shivered when he reached for the stretch kit and removed the next largest-sized insert, this time the longer one specifically made for females.
Pani whimpered when he spread a small amount of cool gel into the narrow slit framed by her fingers, but made no effort at all to resist him. Instead, she lay her head upon his thigh when he found her inside-out clit and resolutely closed her eyes.
Chapter Six
“It’s a weakness,” Ralhan said, when he answered the door to Bach’s knock and Bach first saw the plump blonde from Exotics, Inc., sitting cross-legged on the floor, clutching a stuffed toy to her chest. “When that breeder came through and set his eyes on her, I just had to have her.
She’s much too sweet to go to that kind of place. The scoundrel, I told him she was already sold and refused to buckle, not even when he doubled his price.”
“That’s the last of them, isn’t it?” a woman said from the back doorway. A stately and comely creature, her black hair was piled high in a graceful tower of curls atop her head, her dark eyes glittered warmly and there was a knowing smile upon her face in spite of her tone.
Nil Ralhan closed the door behind Bach. “Sir Bauer, may I introduce to you my wife, Etle.”
Etle glided into the room on a wave of soft perfume. She clasped her hands before her and bowed low to Bach’s superiority, the square neckline of her full-length gown revealing the soft curve of her breasts. “We are honored to have you as our guest.”
“I am grateful to have been invited into your peaceful home,” Bach nodded back.
“No home with seven children and three pets is ever peaceful,” she laughed, her dark eyes twinkling. “But I thank you all the same.” Her gaze fell to Pani, who was standing very close to Bach’s right leg, her hands clinging to his trousers. Without a change in her ethereal expression, Etle thwacked her husband on the arm with the back of her elegant hand. “You should have brought her home.”
“You said—”
“I was wrong.”
Ralhan’s eyes widened. “My, my,” he said. “This is the—”
“Don’t start,” she told him, neatly ending the conversation.
Bach swallowed hard, but managed to smile. He missed those kinds of arguments.
“She is attractive, isn’t she?” Bach extended his hand down the short length of Pani’s leash, pulling her out from behind his leg. She came, but reluctantly, and stood in the middle of the Ralhans’ living room with a thoroughly unnerved look on her face. Bach could understand it.
After spending the last two weeks alone with him, it must have been very disconcerting for her to suddenly find herself in a strange house with three other female pets.
She gargled something in human-speech at them, but Minmin and Binnie only gave her blank looks. Sassa spoke back at her, but whatever she said unnerved Pani even more and she looked up at him with ill concealed frustration. He could see it in her eyes; she thought he was going to abandon her here. From the glare she gave him, he was pleased to note, the idea didn’t strike her as a happy one.
He had dressed her this morning in a small child’s white play dress that tied at the back between her shoulders, but left her exposed bottom a very open and available target. Matching tights and a baby’s soft shoes with pink bows on the toes completed the image of a very spoiled and pampered pet. Her coppery mane was done up in the three ponytails—two on top of her head and one at the back of her nape—which was customarily worn by very young school children.
She mixed right in with Ralhan’s quite obviously cherished pets.
“This is my oldest one, Minmin,” the agent said, pointing to the taller of the three.
Slender as a twig, she was dressed in a sunny yellow jumpsuit, with a white bow in her short brown hair.
“Binnie, get your feet down,” Etle told to the smaller of three.
Laying on her back with her shoes kicking at the arm of the sofa, Binnie gave Etle a mutinous look, but took her feet off the cushions and put them back on the floor. Her little blue dress had a white bib front with a stitched flower on it. Her curly blonde hair was just long enough to pull into two pigtails at either side of her head.
Etle looked to Ralhan, who frowned and nodded, and she stepped in amongst the pets to take Binnie by the arm, hauling her to her feet.
“No, no, Momma!” Binnie cried out as Etle lead her from the living room and down the hall to one of the back rooms.
Bach heard the pet begin to cry a short minute before a distant door closed, muffling the sound.
“She’s been a little pouty since we brought Sassa home,” Ralhan explained. “Jealousy, you know. She’d grown used to being the baby of the family.”
Sassa hugged her toy closer and Pani jumped when, despite the muffling of the door, they heard the first crisp smack of what quickly became the sounds of a regal spanking. Binnie’s wails reached ear-piercing decibels within the first twenty vigorous swats, and still the spanking carried on for a good long time.
“I do believe Etle’s had enough of that attitude,” Ralhan stated.
The shrieks escalated into frantic howls, and Sassa began to cry. Pani turned around, tangling herself on her leash to look up at Bach. With very wide eyes, she tried again to hide behind him.
Minmin was the only one that seemed unaffected by the sound. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she opened a picture book in her lap and flipped through the pages.
Ralhan stepped around Minmin to pick up Sassa. “She’s a sensitive thing,” he told Bach.
“Cries every time the other two get their tails reddened. In fact, she hardly needs any spanking at all herself.”
He lifted the back of her pink dress and pulled up the leggings of her panties to show the fresh bruising that decorated the curve of her rump. “She got that last night. I was very gentle with her really. Of course, she carried on like I was killing her. Her first weekly spanking. She was truly devastated. I had to hold her for an hour afterward, poor thing sobbed herself dry.
What’s worse, she doesn’t understand anything you say to her unless it’s ‘hello’, so I couldn’t even explain to her that weekly spankings were going to be a permanent part of her life with us.”
Ralhan stroked her hair, dropping a fond kiss onto her forehead when Sassy wrapped her arms around his neck and lay her head on his shoulder. “I do think from now on, though, I’ll only give her a fraction of the paddling I give Binnie and Minmin, who need it more.”
Bach admired the marks on Sassa’s flanks, then pulled Pani from out behind his leg again.
Unclipping her leash, he set it on a small table and turned Pani around. Lifting the back of her dress, he pushed her panties down just far enough to bare the summits of her buttocks.
Pani squirmed to yank them back up and even tried to grab his hands to keep him from pulling her underwear farther down. In the end, Bach pinned both her wrists behind her back and hugged her close to still her struggles. Lifting the back of her dress once more, he revealed the cluster of purplish lines cris-crossing all over her otherwise cream-colored buttocks from the top of her crack to the top of her thighs.
“My, my,” Ralhan said. “Are those switch marks, or cane?”
“We had a bit of a tantrum yesterday when it came time for her daily stretching. It took two switches before she’d settle down enough for me to strap her over the chair.” Bach patted her hip when he let her go, and Pani, blushing furiously, pulled her panties back up in one yank.
Facing his chest, she sidled herself back into his embrace and stared off down the hallway. Binnie’s cries were loud and gaspy sobs, and the crisp smacking sounds, while no longer landing as frequently as before, could still be heard quite well.
Pani’s chest heaved as she breathed. She glanced up at Bach with wide, solemn eyes.
“Good girl Pani?”
“Yes,” he reassured, caressing her long mane. “Pani’s a good girl.”
Ralhan’s eyes bugged. “She said that so clearly!”
“I told you. She’s building quite the vocabulary. She says something new almost every day now: more, potty, night-night, bowl, cup. Just this morning, she had the nerve to say ‘Bad Papa’ when I spanked her for going back to bed after I’d already got her up twice.”
Ralhan laughed.
And in the back of the house, the spanking stopped. The only sounds still audible were Binnie’s breathless sobs and the low murmur of Etle’s voice as she comforted and lectured the thoroughly punished pet.
“When she comes out,” Ralhan said, “you’ll be astonished at the transformation one little hairbrush can make. Binnie gets a good one like that at least once a week. It’s a good training technique.”
“Speaking of which,” Bach said as he patted Pani’s back and let her go. “I could use some advice.”
“On?”
“Eating,” Bach said simply. “Pani won’t. I have to force her just to get her to take a bottle, but when it comes to solid foods, she won’t even try it. So tell me, Sir Ralhan, and I will bow to your expertise: How do I get Pani to eat?”
*
Pani was positively swallowed up by the sheer size of the table and chairs Ralhan had set up for the pets. There were now five, plus one child. Ralhan had placed a call to his neighbors, who’d sent over their daughter, Rasha, and her pet, Mot. Mot was a dark-haired, dark-eyed male, dressed in a soft blue-and green-striped dress, floppy floral hat, and holding a matching hand pouch two-sizes too large for him. When they all sat down to tea, on Rasha’s command Mot poured. Mot was a very long-suffering pet.
Party or no, Pani did not look like she was having a good time. Every time she blinked, her eyes shifted from Mot to another pet to the child—which made Bach a little nervous, since Pani was still considered quite wild and not very predictable under the best of circumstances—
then to him, then back to Mot again.
“Biscuits all around,” Rasha said as she extended the plate of cookies to each pet in turn.
They all took one except for Sassa, who took two. When the plate was offered to Pani, she made no move to be cooperative.
Finally, Bach said, “Pani…”
Her gaze slid across the room to his, then she made a face and took a cookie.
“Everybody eat,” Rasha said, and she began very delicately to pick up her biscuit, a messy piece stuffed with cream, and neatly bit into it.
Leaning back in his chair, one hairy leg swinging idly, Mot unfolded one arm from across his chest long enough to snag a cookie and all the pets ate. Except, of course, for Pani, who stared at hers.
Bach sighed. He had to pick out the most difficult pet. “Pani,” he warned again.
She ate, but very grudgingly.
“She’ll get it,” Ralhan said. “Patience is the key, you know.”
“With her stubborn streak, it’ll take the patience of Booj to gain her cooperation.”
Ralhan smiled.
“Does it ever make you wonder though?” Bach asked, and both Nil and Etle looked at him. “What kind of thoughts go through their heads? There has to be more there than blind animal instinct and the vague intelligence of a wild, natural mimic. Some of the things she does are more than just clever. Every so often I find myself wondering if humans can actually reason.”
“They’re animals,” Nil Ralhan said. “I am most infatuated with the species. They are funny, smart, and cute. They seem so much like little children, and I think that’s part of their appeal. And maybe even why, upon occasion, we might be inclined to think them something grander than what they are. But it all comes down to brain size. Little brains equal limited intellectual capacities. They are animals. Intelligent to a point, but no more so than well-trained monkeys from our world. As clever as they are, sadly,” Ralhan gestured to the tea party with one long hand, “this is all they are capable of.”
“Everybody drink,” Rasha commanded.
It only took a look from Bach for Pani to pick up her cup with the others, but she didn’t drink. She was saved from that by the distraction Mot made when he accidentally bumped elbows with Minmin and dumped his teacup into his lap.
“Mot, bad boy!” Rasha scolded as he jumped up from the table with a shout, yanked his soiled dress off his burning legs and sucked a pained breath though gritted teeth. “You got my dress all dirty! I hope Mama spanks your bottom!”
Etle was significantly more sympathetic as she hurried to look at his legs. “Oh dear, look at that color. Rasha, dear, take your pet home. He needs to see a vet.”
Rasha looked at the red marks on his thighs, then made a face as she got down off her chair. “Oh, all right!”
Pani dropped both her cookie and tea cup the instant Rasha led Mot from the table and dragged him out the door. Minmin and Binnie leaned their heads together to quietly gargle back and forth, while Sassa leaned over and helped herself to another biscuit. Swinging her legs and humming happily to herself, she took a big bite and, noticing Pani staring, offered her a bite as well.
Pani got down from the table. She stalked into the living room to get her leash, clipped one end to her collar, then marched herself to the front door. Folding her arms across her chest, she glared at it and waited.