Free Kate and Julia: Slave Girls of the Raj by Lindsey Brooks Page A

he imagine she had no pride, no dignity or self-respect? Did he really think she had sunk so low that she would reveal her nakedness to a crude, coarse native just because he told her to? Yet, her whole future depended on the return of Julia and Kate and getting them to Dhokat on time. All her past trials and humiliations would have been for nothing if she refused now. Penny steeled herself.
    Her head stopped spinning. The blur at the edges of her vision cleared and she saw the menace in the Englishman’s steady stare. Slowly, she reached her shaking hands to the top button of her dress.
    “Let it fall,” Courtney instructed when she had unfastened the last one.
    Belly leaping, Penny allowed the dress to slide from her shoulders and drop to the floor.
    “You have whipped her,” Sahar Gul observed, frighteningly casual, and Penny lowered her eyes from his appraisal of her nudity. “Is she disobedient?”
    “Disrespectful and conceited,” Courtney replied, and grinned at the indignant snort she gave.
    The wazir went behind her, and she jerked violently as his hand closed over her buttocks and her discomfort flared into pain.
    “Stand still,” he barked. “Put your hands on your hips and get your feet wider apart.”
    Pulse racing and gut churning, she obeyed and felt a sudden excitement mingle with her fear at his stern, inflexible command. Oh, heavens! It was happening again.
    “It is the way of the mem-sahibs ,” Sahar said, appearing in front of her and eyeing the rapid rise and fall of her breasts. “They are haughty and proud, and their arrogance makes them slow to obey. I find I punish my white slaves much more often than the others. Yasmeena, show them.”
    The white girl rose from her knees and turned to display the angry red welts on her taut, narrow buttocks that told of a recent beating. He had changed her name, Penny realized. Would that happen to Kate and Julia too?
    “She has been mine for over a year,” the wazir continued, “and still I must give her a dozen regularly to remind her that her pride has no place here.” He laughed as he tweaked the up-tilted point of one of her small, pointed breasts. “But I will admit she pleases me greatly.”
    Penny thought she saw a glint of what might have been pride in the girl’s eyes at that moment, and a small smile on her lips that became a grimace of pain as she obeyed the order to kneel once more. Was it possible the girl had been pleased by his words? Penny was given no time to wonder about it.
    “She has good big tits.”
    She flinched as Sahar weighed them in his hands, but with the warning of the girl’s red-striped bottom fresh in her mind she did not pull away. Two brown-skinned thumbs rubbed her worryingly stiff nipples and she felt a frightening twitch of anticipation between her legs. The wazir gave her teats a very firm squeeze and looked disappointed.
    “A pity she’s not in milk. Look at me.”
    Puzzled by his odd remark, Penny was slow to obey. A shiver ran through her as the pressure of his fingers under her chin lifted her eyes to his. The dark, glittering lust she saw set her quivering again and made her gulp.
    “Does she perform well?”
    “She’s adequate,” Courtney allowed. “Untrained, of course, but quite responsive providing your expectations aren’t too high. Remember, she’s not schooled like a slave girl.”
    “Precisely why she interests me.” Sahar gestured at the girl he called Yasmeena. “White slaves I have, but a free white woman, a true mem-sahib like the arrogant, immodest ones who treat me so patronisingly at their dinners and cocktail parties – that excites my curiosity.” He began unbuttoning his chapaan .
    Penny’s heart leapt. Excites was the right word, she realized, as she saw the big bulge in the front of his trousers. At once she raised her eyes, only to find herself looking again into the blatant desire in his own.
    A curl of fear and excitement made her belly contract at the same moment