Free The Mammoth Book of Erotica presents The Best of Lucy Taylor by Lucy Taylor Page B

released his semen into her and then withdrew.
    She sank to her knees, weeping.
    Gerard grabbed her by the hair and yanked her head back.
    “That was good,” he said. “I’m proud of you. We’re off to a good start.”
    Their next night in the deserted house, he again tied her to a beam, wrists secured over her head, and began to twist and squeeze her nipples. The pain was beyond anything she could have anticipated. She begged and pleaded, made promises of future acts of submission, but he increased the pressure. Then, because the pain was so unbearable and there was no escaping it, her body reacted by convulsing in a fit of laughter. She laughed and sobbed and, in between, implored Gerard to stop hurting her, but by the time he did her nipples had gone numb and, with the blood flowing again, the pain this time was greater than what she’d felt before.
    He left her sobbing with fury at the pain and the futility of fighting it. When he returned, what seemed like hours later, he kissed her swollen nipples and fed her grapes he’d found growing in a nearby vineyard.
    “Tell me how much you love me.”
    “I hate you. You’re a monster.”
    “Tell me how much you love everything I do to you.”
    “Let me go. Please, just let me go.”
    “There is nowhere to go. The plague is everywhere. There’s only death.”
    She spat the chewed grapes out at him, spattering his face with sticky pulp, then caught his finger in her mouth and bit it to the bone.
    He cradled his bleeding hand and eyed her coldly.
    “I’d thought that you were doing well. I see now I was wrong. I must be stricter with you.”
    He left her then, still tied, and came back brandishing a lit candle. At the first touch of the flame against her flesh, her courage failed her. She began to beg and weep, but Gerard was implacable. He moved the candle up and down her body, its shadow dancing across her flesh. Rarely did he let the fire make contact, but when he did, the agony elicited a howl. He singed a spot below her nipple, touched the flame to her thigh and the tender spot at the base of her spine, while she thrashed against her bindings.
    “Tell me how much you like this!
Tell
me!”
    The flame blazed in her face and burned her eyes. It filled her head with an unnatural light that grew brighter and brighter before exploding into darkness.
    She dreamed she was a young child, ill with the fever that had swept through her village one winter, killing half a dozen babies and a few of the older children. Her mother had held her and sung her lullabies that had been handed down for centuries.
    She had not gotten better right away. Instead, the fever had buoyed her along like a flooding stream, sweeping her far into the depths and byways and canyons of her mind, but, for the first time in her life, she had felt loved and safe, unafraid of the death the sickness seemed to be carrying her toward.
    She opened her eyes.
    He had cut her down from the beam and laid her on the bed. When she moved, the pain from her burns flared, making her gasp.
    “Lie still,” he told her.
    “Why are you doing this?”
    “Shhh.”
    He slid into the bed with her and spooned himself around her. His naked flesh was warm and comforting. When he cupped one hand around her breast and slid the other up between her legs, her sigh was both of pleasure and of resignation. His mouth roved over the back of her neck, his breath disturbed the tendrils of hair along her cheekbone, his tongue probed the delicate convolutions of her ear.
    She turned and sobbed against his chest. “It’s all right,” he murmured. “The things I do may seem a strange way to win your love, but don’t forget I marched with the Brethren of the Cross. I know the sorcery that pain and then the absence of pain can work upon the mind. I know that pain can penetrate a heart that can’t be opened any other way.”
    He held her and she clung to him and sobbed harder.
    Knowing how desperately she wanted closeness,