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Chapter Fourteen
Revenge
On the word ‘payback’ his hand reached the increasingly heated juncture of my thighs. My whole body stiffened and I pressed my lips together to suppress the involuntary sounds forcing their way out of me. My food sat cold and forgotten before me, my mouth was dry, and my cheeks increasingly warm. I clamped my thighs together on the intruding hand but Nicolo simply pushed them apart again.
“Don’t deny me, Charlotte,” he leaned in to whisper.
So, I opened my legs to him and he responded by immediately seeking out the hot and moist flesh between them. No man had ever touched me here before—in my most private of places. There had been lessons I’d learned, of course, lessons regarding where a man might enjoy touching a woman. And later I’d practiced those lessons on myself, but touching myself couldn’t compete with how it felt to be touched by someone else, by a man… by Nicolo.
On the one hand, I was thrilled it was Nicolo who was the first to touch me in such a way, with such firm, easy confidence, butwhydid it have to be here, now, in public and with the whole damn court around us?
The answer became quite clear: because this wasn’t foreplay, it was punishment. Nicolo would use pleasure to teach me a lesson, to get his own back. And I didn’t know whether to be happy or sad about it. In fact, at the present, my emotions weren’t mine to control, I was in Nicolo’s hands.
Literally in fact.
He continued his firm but gentle manipulations as I fought to regulate my breathing, fought not to grip the side of the table, fought to keep the sounds rising up from my throat to myself. Meanwhile, the maids cleared away the first course, the table hiding, more or less, what was going on. If I’d ever doubted the sexual credentials of Nicolo, or his experience; if I’d ever wondered why the ladies of the court and the maids in the dormitory were simultaneously afraid of him yet also panting for his attention, I no longer doubted nor wondered.
Nicolo’s fingers played me like an instrument, and the master was a maestro. He knew precisely where and how to touch me, whether to linger or pay a brief visit, where to be firm and where to be feather-light. My body was his to command, it did as he told it, and I experienced the sensations he inflicted with wicked pleasure and consummate skill.
“Your glass is empty.”
I gasped as his fingers left me to beckon over the steward, who might have glanced twice at my heated cheeks, short breaths and rapidly rising and lowering chest as he poured the wine. I, meanwhile, huffed and puffed as if I was relearning how to breathe.
“Ah, the second course,” Nicolo smiled as trays were carried in. “A true gourmet enjoys each more than the last.” Then he turned to face me and held up his goblet, as though to cheers me. “The first is just a warm-up.”
The double meaning was not that subtle and as the food was left before us, his hand returned beneath the table again. His fingers were back at my knees and I wondered if we were starting all over again, but then I felt him bunching and tugging, pulling my skirt up to my waist, so only the table cloth prevented the people on the lower tables from seeing me bared before them.
“That’s better, that was very much in the way,” smiled Nicolo, as if talking to himself.
“Master…” I began.
“There is nothing you can say to change what’s about to happen.” His cool fingers brushed the warm flesh of my right thigh. “Although I suppose you could get up and leave.”
Presumably I could have, but I didn’t. And that was telling—to us both.
Nicolo chuckled as his fingers moved faster this time, tracing the same path up my inner thigh with only one destination in mind and I bit my lip when he reached it. The second course seemed to be dedicated to stroking, light, fingertip strokes, as if my nether regions were a nervous mare that needed to be calmed before she was mounted. Increasing my frustration, Nicolo barely touched the heated center of my arousal, working his way with unctuous slowness around the outskirts, only occasionally touching that one spot where I most needed his touch.
He stilled his right hand between my legs as he began to tell a joke to those seated nearby, as the second course was swept away and the third brought out.
“… and the lady then says, ‘No, but the donkey can stay.’.”
The gales of laughter that greeted the punchline conveniently covered my sudden gasp as Nicolo pressed his index finger inside me.
“Do you know how many courses there are?” asked Nicolo, conversationally, as he turned back to face me.
“No, Master.” I barely heard what he said or understood my own answer. My whole world was focused on that single digit, sunk inside me up to the knuckle, which now began to explore and test the elastic confines of its surroundings.
“I believe its seven,” said Nicolo, smugly.
“Seven?”
His wicked smile grew even more so. “Each more delectable than the last.” He chuckled as my breath hitched. “You might want to try to relax.”
The courses came and went, and Nicolo’s fingers went about their deft business between my thighs with a combination of skill, determination and playful whimsy, all delivered with the ruthlessness of a torturer.
Mistress Aurore had once told us that pleasure could be a weapon; I’d never really thought about the reality of that, but Nicolo understood it very well, and wielded that weapon with luxurious cruelty.
How was it possible for something to feel so good that it hurt? How was it possible to simultaneously want something to stop and for it to last forever? How was it possible for pleasure to acquire a physical weight so it felt as if it was pinning me to my chair? How was it possible for this man to have such total control over me, body and mind?
