Page 14 of Her Viking Guardian

“…How may I serve you, Master?” Giovanna intoned, and the sixth and final stroke fell.

Master. Sometime soon. Oh… oh, no…

I lay over the chair and wept. The pain seemed a living thing across my bottom and thighs, pulsing with my heartbeat, but—and this was the thing I could not look at directly, the thing that terrified me more than the whipping itself—beneath it lay the warmth. The same warmth I had felt over the rowing bench and the bride saddle and… and in my grandmother’s pendant. It spread from the welts inward. It settled low in my belly, and I recognized it because I had spent an evening in a limestone cavern learning its precise character.

Giovanna set the mastix down somewhere. I heard the small sound of it being placed on a surface with care.

“Say it,” she said.

My lips moved against the leather. I tasted salt.

“How may I serve you, Mistress?” I whispered.

The silence that followed had a different quality from the silences that had preceded it. Something in the room had changed. I could feel the huge man still standing by the door, a quiet presence, I could feel Giovanna behind me, I could feel the welts on my bottom cooling very slightly in the air, and I could feel—God help me—the slickness between my thighs that had nothing to do with tears.

“Stand up,” Giovanna said. “Face me.”

I pushed myself up from the chair. My arms shook. I turned, and the movement of my jeans and panties bunched around my knees made me stumble slightly. I caught myself and stood there, looking at Giovanna through wet lashes. I felt the pendant settle against my chest, and it did feel warm.

Her face was beautiful and completely composed. She studied me the way she had studied me at the café, but the appraisal had changed. It was no longer speculative. It had become proprietary.

“Now,” she said. “Take off your clothes.”

I took off my clothes.

I didn’t take them off in the slow, careful, self-deceiving way I’d stripped in the cavern, to ride the Viking bride saddle for what I’d somehow managed to persuade myself would be research purposes. This time I took them off because Giovanna had told me to, and because the welts across my bottom had made the meaning of my obedience very clear.

I pushed my jeans and panties the rest of the way down and stepped out of them. I pulled my shirt over my head. I reached back and unhooked my beige bra with fingers that only trembled slightly. I stood in front of Giovanna and the silent nymphobus and let them look at me.

Giovanna gazed for a long moment. Her expression remained proprietary, even acquisitive.

“Is the pendant special?” she asked, the gentleness of her voice surprising me.

I nodded, feeling my brow furl as I wondered what the question, and my answer, implied for the pendant and for me.

“Give it to me,” Giovanna said. “I promise to take care of it and to return it to you when you may wear it again.”

I swallowed hard. I didn’t know why I trusted her, and yet I did. I reached behind my neck and undid the clasp. The little ivory disk with its rune did feel warm as I handed it to the gorgeous woman into whose power it seemed I’d come.

She examined it, a little smile playing across her lips.

“A Viking rune,” she murmured. “How appropriate.”

A chill went down my spine. I had known, deep down, that my meeting with this woman and the insane, humiliating, terrifying, painful things that had followed must have something to do with my crazy visit to the Norse cavern. This confirmation, without any indication of what on earth, or on Yggdrasil, it meant, sent my mind reeling.

Something about the sheer incongruousness of the moment, or perhaps about my utter incomprehension, made me babble.

“It’s the Elder Futhark,” I told her. “It was my grandmother’s, though she never told anyone how she got it. It’s… the rune, I mean… it’s wunjo, kind of a W, or sometimes a V…”

“Shh,” Giovanna said. “As I said, it’s appropriate that you have come wearing it, and it is appropriate that I have made you remove it.”

“Why…” I started, but the look in my new mistress’s eyes told me of the danger before I could reach a second word.

Questions are useless.

I watched her drop my grandmother’s pendant into her pocket. Then she turned to the panel in the wall from which she had taken the mastix. I hadn’t understood what it was when she’d first opened it to retrieve the horrid whip, but now I watched her work a recessed latch and remove what looked like a series of black leather belts of varying lengths.

“Arms out a bit,” she said, “and your feet at shoulder width.”