Frayed Bonds Read online

  John Tregarth had intended to send Peter Mainwaring away. He’d waited in the parlor on the appointed day determined to meet the carriage when it approached the house and tell his oldest friend to drive on. Amy, he had decided, would come around on her own. Tregarth could wait for her. Peter Mainwaring had it all wrong. Amy didn’t want a taste of the whip. She was sweetness and light, innocence and purity, and her coldness in the bedroom would thaw with time and patience.

  He’d been daydreaming about her in the parlor, lulled by the quiet of the house with all the servants gone and didn’t hear the carriage approach. Then Peter was there, in the drive.

  Tregarth had made Peter promise to respect his boundaries. Amy’s virginity was gone, of course, but Tregarth still couldn’t stand the idea of his best friend sliding his cock into her narrow, still almost innocent sheath. It trespassed somehow, in a way that sliding flesh into her mouth did not.

  Peter gathered the bags he’d brought with him. “We have a great deal to do. Show me Amy’s room,” he commanded, and Tregarth obeyed.

  He watched in dazed silence while Peter Mainwaring swept Amy’s cupboards empty, depositing her dresses and stockings and stays in an unused room below the stairs and locking the door. He hammered nails into her windows—small and easy enough to remove but forming an effective prison for the time being. He demanded to be shown the rooms on either side of the bedchamber, and after a careful examination of both, he selected Amy’s workroom, with its neatly organized sewing and embroidery piles, and drilled a small hole at eye level in the wall between the two rooms.

  And there Tregarth had remained. He’d resisted the impulse to look into the adjoining room until Amy’s startled cry had drawn him to the peephole.

  It had been all he could do to stop himself from rushing to her rescue. The horror etched on her face had made his heart constrict. Then he’d watched her bolt for the door, and Mainwaring hurl her back into the room. If she’d been hurt, he would have stopped it then and there, but she was unscathed, and then Peter had begun speaking to her in the commanding voice he’d used on the men they’d led in the war and on women in the bedroom for as long as Tregarth had known him. Tregarth had watched a dreamy look come over his wife’s delicate features, felt lust stir his cock as she’d peeled her chemise off, and felt his member spring to full attention when she dropped to her knees and opened her mouth to engulf Peter’s shaft.

  Tregarth had been standing a little away from the wall, his eye pressed to the peephole, feet apart. Without conscious thought he freed his own stiff cock from his trousers, and began to stroke it.

  He slowed when Peter slowed, tried with all his might to imagine that it was Amy’s mouth pleasuring him. But he found himself spilling long before Peter, forced to watch his wife pleasuring another man while his own cock softened.

  He would have stopped it then, broken through the locked door to claim her, to save her, to save himself, but for the wanton, desperate way Amy’s legs fell open when, tied face-up on the wicked bench, she saw the jutting marble cock in Peter’s hand.

  * * * * *

  “No,” she said it even as she realized her legs were falling open and her hips were tilting up in invitation.

  The masked man smiled his crooked, bittersweet smile and said, “Yes.”

  “What is it?” she asked, unable to take her eyes off the veined marble shaft, so delicately carved it seemed to pulse with life.

  “I’m surprised you need to ask considering the pretty show you made with your mouth a few minutes ago, but I’m feeling indulgent. It’s a dildo, a marble cock, a pleasure toy. The idea is as old as recorded history, the materials as varied as imagination can make them, but few are more lifelike than this example. I chose it carefully. The artist is a genius. His less amorous creations adorn some of the finest homes and public buildings, and he can make marble breathe.”

  Amy wished she could breathe, but she could only draw air in ragged, panting sobs. “I don’t want that,” she said.

  He laid a hand on her thrusting hip. “I beg to differ. You’re offering yourself like a cat in heat, my lovely slut.”

  The filthy endearment made her feel warm inside, drove her lust higher, but she didn’t want the marble imposter. “I want you,” she said, the anguish clear in her voice.

  The masked man froze for a moment, tension cording the muscles of his arms and thighs visible beneath his tight trousers and rolled shirtsleeves. “You husband has forbidden it, otherwise I would oblige you without a moment’s delay. Instead, I am going to prove to him that you are not frigid and make you come prettily on this exquisite toy.”

  He ran the marble phallus over her tummy, her breasts. “Please no. It’s cold and dry. You’ll hurt me. Please just touch me.”

  Again, the half smile. “I could diddle you all day and it would prove nothing. I could make almost any woman come screaming by playing her clit long enough.”

  To demonstrate, he slid his fingers once over her mons and she sobbed. It was almost, but not quite enough, to carry her over the threshold. “But that’s not what your husband is interested in. He’s interested in fucking you properly, with your pretty wrists trussed, while you respond as I know you can.”

  He stroked the marble cock thoughtfully. “It is, as you say, cold and dry. Perhaps you would like to warm it before it enters your little cunny?”

  She stared up at him blankly. “Warm it? How?”

  “You’re a quick witted creature. You tell me how. You could stroke it, of course, but your hands aren’t free.”

  He couldn’t mean…the thought brought further warmth to her heated flesh…

  “Put it in my mouth,” she whispered, aghast at what she was saying.

  He smirked. “That sounds awfully like an order, and you don’t give the orders today, my sweet. Ask again.”

  “Put it in my mouth, please?”

  He didn’t move.

  “Please, Sir?”

  He cocked his head and watched her. She wracked her brain. What did he want to hear?

  “Put it in my mouth please, Sir,” she begged.

  “Good girl.”

  The praise went straight to her aching, empty pussy, and she opened her mouth obediently when he pressed the marble cock to her lips.

  “This may teach you to keep your sharp little teeth out of the way,” he said.

  She was afraid he would thrust it in and chip her tooth just to make his point, but he only nudged at her lips until they opened and held the thing at an angle where she could suck and lave it with her tongue.

  He stroked her hair tenderly while she fellated the marble cock, and when the shaft was slick with her saliva, he drew it away and poised it at the entrance to her weeping slit.

  Peter had considered giving in to her for a fraction of a second. The door was locked, after all, and Tregarth might not even be watching. And this, clearly, would be his last chance to fuck Amy.

  He’d mastered the impulse and become quickly caught up in the game he’d planned. Watching her suck the marble dildo had been almost as enjoyable as watching her suck his cock. And seeing her come on it would be even better.

  He didn’t impale her right away. He was too entranced by the contrast of her flushed, wet pink labia against the pale marble. The rigidity of the marble emphasized the softness of her flesh, and when he pushed the head inside and the carved glans disappeared in her folds, he knew he’d never seen anything more arousing in all his life. He hoped to hell Tregarth was watching because no one could call Amy Tregarth frigid after this.

  She sighed with gratification when it entered her then moaned and bucked in desperation, greedy for the rest of the marble intruder. He’d selected the wicked toy carefully, conscious of her near innocence and having no desire to injure her. It was slightly more slender than a man would be, and although rigid, unlikely to hurt her tender flesh if used gently.

  “Please,” she pleaded with him. “I want you. Not that thing. You.” She sobbed with frustra
tion.

  Then he gave her another inch, and she convulsed. Not quite an orgasm, but a signal of impending climax. It was almost too easy. He angled the phallus down, pointing the head away from the sensitive front wall of her vagina, withholding sensation and release.

  She mewled like a kitten, writhed on the bench, tried to change the angle of his penetration. “Good girl,” he praised her. “Find where it feels good, Amy. Fuck yourself on the cock. Show me how prettily you come.”

  “Please,” she begged.

  “Work for it,” he urged her.

  “Please,” she said again, “please, I want you to kiss me.”

  He had been hard since the moment she’d opened her legs, but this was something else entirely. Lust was one thing, but longing was another, and this was longing. He longed to kiss her, longed to slip his tongue into her mouth.

  He remembered their audience, his eyes darting to the hole he had drilled in the wall. Tregarth hadn’t forbidden him to kiss her, but it wasn’t exactly part of his usual dominant play. It was intimate in a way that fucking was not, that plunging a dildo into her tiny body was not, that gagging her with his cock was not. It was a violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of his agreement.

  And still he couldn’t resist her. He bent over her and pressed his lips to her open mouth, captured her sobs, quieted her, teased her tongue with his own. “Yes,” she was murmuring now between kisses, “yes, please. Please. I want you. Take the thing out. Please, I want you.”

  It was too quiet for her husband to hear, but it snapped Peter back to reality. He lifted his head and watched her. She was wanton, drunk with passion, desperate for a warm, live cock, any cock. Not his, he told himself. To her, he was a masked stranger, not Peter Mainwaring.

  He placed a hand on her pubic bone to still her frantic movements, then said cruelly, “Show your husband how prettily you come.”

  Her eyes snapped open. She looked frantically around the room.

  He gave her another inch, to remind her what they were here for. She groaned. “Where is he?”

  “Your husband? He’s watching us.”

  He angled the cock up and she sobbed. “No!”

  “Yes, Amy. He’s watching you give to a piece of cold stone what you would not give to him. And after today all that will change, won’t it? You’re going to show him your real self.” He slid the dildo in to the hilt and watched her.

  The tide that would carry her over into release was building and there was no stopping it. She tried to resist, tried to still her hips and her jiggling breasts, tried to close her splayed legs, but she couldn’t. “Yes!” she shouted, and exploded, her fluids drenching his wrist and pooling on the wooden bench beneath the quivering cheeks of her ass.

  He might have wrung another climax from her, but his point was made. Tregarth must know now what his wife needed, and Amy herself was deep in a receptive state. He slipped the marble phallus from her limp body. It only remained for him to call John into the room and leave them to it. She would accept her husband, accept this part of herself, if Tregarth insinuated himself quickly enough into Peter’s shoes.

  And Peter needed relief after Amy’s performance. The thought of a welcoming body was little consolation however, though it was better than relying on his hand.

  He could not stop himself from brushing the hair from her face, pulling the sweat-soaked tendrils off her cheeks and tucking them behind her ears.

  “I’m going to summon your husband now. You’re his,” he ground out, hating the truth of it.

  He started for the door.

  “Don’t go,” she begged.

  He stopped. “Do you love him?” he asked. He sounded like a lovesick schoolboy and hated himself for it.

  “Yes,” she said softly.

  “Then show him the part of yourself you have just shown me, and you will both be happy.”

  “Only if you fuck me first, Peter.”

  She’d suspected it was Peter when he’d instructed her to choose a word, and he’d stiffened at the sound of his middle name. Then he’d kissed her, and she’d been certain.

  He was poised to leave now, and she could not let him. “I’m not sorry I ran from you at Brinley,” she went on, trying desperately to keep him in the room. “I love John. I was always going to choose John.”

  He wasn’t moving a muscle. The mask hid his expression, but she knew she was hurting him. She knew she had to get past the part that was cruel and hurtful to what was true and important right now. “But I need you now,” she said, “I need you inside me.”

  “You need your husband.” He sounded hoarse, whether with lust or with anger she wasn’t certain.

  “No. I need you. You showed me what I need, and if you leave now, if I never know what it is to have you inside me, I’ll never be able to give myself fully to John.”

  “I made a promise,” he said, but he’d already retreated from the door, begun to run his hands up and down her prone body. “Amy, Amy, I want to be inside you but I promised him that this,” he said, sliding his fingers into her still fluttering quim, “was for him alone.”

  He’d been ready to leave. It was the perfect moment. She was languid, receptive but not entirely sated. One climax would barely take the edge off the lust he had carefully built in her, built for John to pluck the fruit of. What he ought to do was walk out now, leaving her like that for her husband. After the show they had just put on, no doubt John Tregarth was ready for the rutting of his life, and at last he would have a willing, self-accepting wife to ride to completion with.

  Instead he found himself kneeling beside the bench, breathing in the scent of her arousal, lowering his mouth to hers to kiss her deeply, playing his fingers through the moisture drenching her quim, her thighs, the crack of her ass.

  “Amy,” he said, lifting his mouth from hers, “tell me again what you want.”

  “I want you inside me, Peter.”

  She used his name again, and it almost unmanned him.

  “There is a way,” he said, sliding his fingers down past her cunny, over the sensitive flesh of her perineum, to spread moisture over her pert rosebud. It was already slick with her juices, and when he pressed a single digit to the puckered hole, he discovered she was too innocent to tense with fear.

  “Oh.” Her lips formed an opening as ripe as the one he was exploring.

  He kissed her again, pressing his finger a little further, turning, exploring, taking care not to destroy the precious gift of her fearlessness. Most likely she had no idea what he intended.

  “Do you like that?” he asked, moving his fingertip gently in and out, sliding a little further each time.

  “Oh yes!”

  He savored the dreamy look on her face.

  “Tell me you want it. Tell me to fuck your ass.”

  She groaned, pulling her knees up to her chest, allowing him complete access to her last vestige of virginity. “Please, Peter, fuck my ass.”

  She still didn’t know what she was asking. He knew that some women liked a finger in their tightest hole but nothing else. Still, it thrilled him to hear her say the words. “Tell me, Amy. Tell me to put my cock in your ass,” he urged.

  “Please, Peter, put your cock in my ass.”

  He kissed her deeply, withdrew his hands from her trembling body and untied her wrists. He helped her rise, naked, flushed, glorious, from the bench and drew her gently to the foot of the bed where he took his mask off. She reached up to touch his face and he thought his heart would break as she murmured, “Peter, please. I need you.”

  She had heard that it would hurt, the way that men, soldiers and sailors and schoolboys, often penetrated other men, and sometimes women. She had always longed for it, from her first awareness of her budding sexuality. While she would have preferred Peter Mainwaring to join with her in the way she was more used to, she understood why he would not. If he took her in the more conventional way, it would be the first time she had enjoyed the act with a man, and that belonged
rightly to John who she loved.

  But she cared for Peter deeply, could have married him if she had never known John—loved him in a different fashion.

  When he removed the mask it filled her heart with a strange joy, like a reunion with a long absent friend, and she reached up to twine her hands in his soft hair and lavish kisses over his high cheekbones and strong jaw.

  He held her gently, almost reverently, and when his voice broke through her reverie it was commanding but strained with emotion. “Bend over the bed, Amy.”

  He guided her to stand at the foot of the four-poster, pushed her belly flush with the mattress, then bent her over and pressed her face to the soft, quilted counterpane. Instinctively she reached out and closed her hands around the smoothly turned wood of the bedposts. She watched him fasten delicate silver manacles on slender chains around the fluted columns then test the weight of the metal in his hands.

  “Please,” she begged. She longed for him to restrain her, while at the same time she was flattered that he trusted her to obey him while he carried out his designs.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” he said, letting the manacles drop with a musical, silvery clang to dangle empty from the bedposts.

  She groaned in disappointment and he slapped the upturned cheek of her ass.

  “No whining, my love. You’re too delicate for shackles.”

  He disappeared briefly from view, and she heard him moving in the room behind her, but she dared not stir to turn and look. Instead, she concentrated on how satisfying it was to offer her body like this. She slid her feet apart, wider and wider, so the cool air of the room caressed the cleft between her buttocks, where her deep need pulsed steadily with anticipation.

  He took in the sight of her bent face down over the foot of the bed. The manacles would never do. Her soft wrists would chafe inside them, and he wanted nothing to distract her from what he was about to do. He selected instead two lengths of black silk, much better suited for his purpose, and perused the bottles lining her dressing table. He wanted oil or lotion, something without strong scent or astringent qualities. After opening and sniffing a half dozen jars and pots he discovered a porcelain crock filled with sweet almond oil and set it on the bed in front of Amy.