Page 57 of Her Viking Guardian

Because if my master stood there, his manhood rock hard, and did nothing—if he merely watched, allowing himself the pleasure of my being displayed and disciplined, naked and degraded, without needing to gratify himself immediately—then the lesson felt even greater.

I must learn that I truly was a thing being looked at… a fuck toy being assessed, being enjoyed and possessed by a man whose self-mastery exceeded my own by so much it made me clench under my mistress’s lashes.

I made a broken sound around the cock of Nymphobus Oceanus. He shifted his hips once, not to punish me, but to settle the head of himself more securely on my tongue.

“There,” Giovanna said behind me. Her voice had regained its cool exactness. “Now perhaps the lesson will remain.”

The lesson. The leathers in my heart.

And suddenly, absurdly, devastatingly, I understood what she meant at a deep level, a level at which my mind refused to think.

My obedience had not actually imposed itself on me from outside. The leather had not created it. The cuffs and collar and belt had only named, outlined, called forth something that had already existed in me in some dormant and deeply hidden form. Something that had been waiting with humiliating patience.

Waiting for my Herra to find it.

Waiting for Giovanna to discipline it into visibility.

Waiting, perhaps, through all the years I had spent calling myself independent and rational and modern, for someone to show me that what I had mistaken for freedom included a hunger to be bound correctly.

The thought was so total that tears spilled down my face afresh. I held the penis in my mouth as gently and steadily as I could and felt, with a kind of inward shudder, that the bellatrix was right.

I did wear the leathers in my heart.

Perhaps I always had.

“Enough,” Giovanna said.

Her fingers came to my shoulder. Her attendant withdrew slowly from my mouth, and the little wet pop of my lips releasing him seemed indecently loud in the stone room. I bowed my head at once, breathing through my nose, saliva cooling on my swollen lips. My bottom burned in three separate bands that seemed to pulse in time with my heartbeat.

Giovanna took me under my left armpit and brought me upright. My legs trembled badly enough that for a moment I thought I might collapse anyway, but I stayed on my feet. I kept my eyes lowered. I could not have looked at Henrik even if I had been ordered to. I felt too exposed in this new way, with nothing on my body at all and the marks of the mastix speaking for me in fresh fire.

“Bene factum,” Giovanna murmured. It is well done. To my dismay, the words comforted me.

She crossed to a tall narrow cabinet set into the wall and opened it. I thought I heard hangers moving across a bar and perhaps the slide of fabric. I felt my brow crease in confusion: I had, it seemed, become so accustomed to my new status as a naked sexual servant that the sounds seemed almost jarring.

When my mistress turned back to me, she held a bundle in her arms that looked, at first, impossibly soft and civil after everything that had just happened.

A sundress.

I blinked at it. The fabric was light, some fine summer cotton or silk blend, pale and lovely and feminine in a way that seemed almost obscene in contrast to the chamber. It had a fitted bodice and a skirt that would fall loosely around my knees, printed with small flowers in shades of blue and coral over ivory. Draped over Giovanna’s arm as well was a lacy pink bra and matching panties—delicate, pretty, almost girlish. In her other hand she had a pair of simple sandals with fine straps.

The effect was so disorienting that I simply stared.

“We are not taking you to Capo Zafferano naked,” Giovanna said, a sardonic smile on her face.

The bra came first. She handed it to me and I fumbled with the clasp behind my back, as if I had never put one on before. It lifted my breasts into soft cups of pink lace that made me feel more naked in some emotional sense even as they covered me.

Then the panties. My hand trembled as I took them from Giovanna’s hand. Their lace brushed the cleft between my thighs, and I sucked in a breath at the tenderness there and behind, where I’d just been whipped. To my dismay, I had a fleeting feeling of wrongness, as if something in me knew that my master’s sight of my pussy, bared for his use, shouldn’t be impeded this way. I shouldn’t be permitted to hide the fisse where his reðr took its pleasure, when he chose to enjoy his bed thrall.

On the other hand, Giovanna had hidden that part of me, but she had also marked it out with the pink lace, as a place worthy of adornment… the decoration not for me but for Herra Henrik, to increase the aesthetic value of the cunt he owned.

My brow furrowed again at the strangeness of it. Clothing no longer restored me to independence, let alone innocence. It merely dressed me up for the next time I would serve my master’s hardness.

Giovanna lowered the sundress over my head. The fabric slid down my body in a cool rush, settling over my breasts and waist and hips with a grace that made me think absurdly of department stores and summer holidays and women having lunch on terraces. Yet beneath it my bottom stung fiercely, and my mouth still tasted of two men. The dissonance made my head swim.

She knelt to put the sandals on me herself, fastening the little buckles at my ankles with evident care. The intimacy of it—my first captor dressing me, as if I were a child or a doll or a bride—sent a fresh flush through my whole body.

“There,” she said, rising and smoothing the skirt once over my thighs. “You can pass in public.”