Free The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty by Anne Rice Page B

high, her breasts a terrible aching weight as they swayed, and again came the belt smacking her and stinging her.
    The Prince seemed in a fury.
    The blows came faster and faster, as fast as she was moving her legs, and very soon, Beauty was writhing and struggling to get away from them. She was crying aloud unable to stop herself but the worst of it, the worst of it, was his anger. If only this were for his delight, if only he were pleased with her. She was crying and burying her face in her arm and the balls of her feet were burning, and her thighs felt swollen and blotched with pain as now again he took out his temper upon her buttocks.
    The smacks came so quickly, she had no sense of how many there were, only that it was a great deal more than he’d ever given her before, and it seemed he only grew more agitated, his left hand now thrusting her chin up and closing her mouth so she couldn’t cry, all the while he commanded her to march faster and lift her legs higher.
    “You belong to me!” he said without ever stopping the loud spanking belt. “And you will learn to please me in all things, and you will never please me with your eyes upon the male slaves of my mother. Is this clear to you? Do you understand?”
    “Yes, my Prince,” she struggled to say.
    But he seemed at wits ends to punish her. And stopping her suddenly by lifting her around the middle, he brought her up over the stool which he had just left, so that dangling from the hook which she held for dear life, she was now thrust over it, the wooden seat of the stool pressing into her naked sex, her legs out helplessly behind her.
    And then he sent his worst rain of blows on her, hard snapping spanks that made her calves quiver and sting as her thighs had done before. But no matter how he busied himself with her legs, he always returned to her buttocks, punishing them the hardest so that Beauty was choking with sobs, and felt this as endless.
    Quite suddenly he stopped.
    “Let go the hook,” he commanded, and then he scooped her up over his shoulder and taking her across the room, he flung her down on the bed.
    She fell back on the pillow, and immediately beneath her sore and swollen buttocks and thighs felt a prickling and a roughness. She had only to cast her head slightly to the side to see the jewels glittering on the coverlet. And she knew how they would torture her as soon as he had mounted her.
    But she wanted him so badly. And when she saw him rise up over her, she felt not the hot throbbing pain in her body but a flood of juices between her legs and a new moan coming out of her as she opened herself to him.
    She couldn’t keep from lifting her hips, praying it didn’t displease him.
    He knelt over her, removing his erect cock from his breeches, and then he brought her up on her knees and impaled her upon it.
    She cried out. Her head fell back. It was a great hard driving thing inside her sore and quivering orifice. But she felt it bathed with her juices, and as the Prince forced it in deeper and brought her down upon it, it seemed a spit that rubbed against some mysterious core in her, sending the ecstasy washing through her so she was giving great guttural moans in spite of herself. The Prince’s thrusts came faster and faster and then he too gave a soft cry, and held her close to him, her breasts aching and pressed to his chest, his lips on the back of her neck, his body softening slowly.
    “Beauty, Beauty,” he whispered. “You have conquered me as surely as I have conquered you. Don’t ever arouse my jealousy again. I don’t know what I would do if you did it!”
    “My Prince,” she moaned and kissed him on the mouth, and when she saw the distress in his face, she covered it with kisses.
    “I’m your slave, my Prince,” she said.
    But he would only moan and press his face into her neck, and seemed bereft.
    “I love you,” she implored him, and then he laid her down on the bed, and drawing up beside her, took his wine from the