Game Read online

  Lloyd stirs and rustles among the sleeping bags, then unties my wrists. ‘Did that work for you?’ he asks with a yawn.

  ‘You know it did.’

  ‘I know how you love a forced seduction.’

  ‘And you don’t?’

  He chuckles guiltily. ‘Bang to rights.’

  ‘In fact, I’m considering a sequel. I want to know what happens when she turns up at the Dark Prince’s lair now. I’m imagining lots of pointy towers and turrets on the side of a crag. She’d turn up and the Dark Prince would subject her to a virginity test.’

  ‘Surely he’d just go ballistic and run her through with his mighty sword?’

  ‘Well, yeah, running through with your mighty sword is always good, but my Dark Prince isn’t as dark as all that. He’s miffed, of course, but he’s still interested in the dowry the Princess brings, so he decides to go through with the wedding.’

  ‘Really? You think he would?’

  ‘He wants that alliance. But the wedding night would be pretty fierce. Quite a BDSM scene, I think. Some punishment, maybe a bit of bondage. And anal sex. He wants to take a virginity, even if it isn’t the traditional kind.’

  Lloyd exhales heavily. ‘Don’t turn me on again, Sophie. I seriously think you’ve broken my cock, what with all that shagging al fresco on the forest floor earlier.’

  ‘Aww.’ I reach down and fondle the poor little semi-tumescent soldier. ‘I won’t make you fuck me again,’ I promise. ‘Not tonight. But that scene has to be played sometime soon.’

  ‘Oh yes. I’m not arguing about that.’

  He removes my hand from his cock and puts an arm around me, drawing me against him so that we make one big bundle of satiated sleepiness.

  ‘Soph,’ he says, just before I nod off.

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘Do you think we’ll ever get into a rut?’

  I am amused. ‘Our relationship is one long rut, isn’t it?’

  ‘You know what I mean, Oscar Wilde. Do you think you’ll ever get bored with this?’

  ‘What, with a metric tonne of quality sex? I don’t think so.’

  ‘It’s just … I can’t help wondering why you carry on paying rent on that flat when my suite at the hotel is big enough for –’

  Ah. This again.

  ‘Lloyd. I said I’d think about it. I’m still thinking.’

  ‘Your thought processes are seriously slow. You said that six months ago. You can’t fob me off forever.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘I know you, Sophie Martin.’ He turns, props himself on an elbow and puts a finger to my protesting lips. ‘You will.’

  He’s right. But I don’t understand the big deal. We see each other all the time – we work together, for heaven’s sake. We couldn’t be any closer. Why do we need old-fashioned symbols of commitment to prove it? I’m a person who lives for the day, and the day is sunny right now. It makes no sense to change that.

  I can’t be bothered to argue though, so I mentally prepare myself for the nth recitation of Why Sophie Should Move In With Lloyd.

  It doesn’t happen. What he says instead is exponentially more interesting.

  ‘You won’t ever make the decision, Soph, so I’m going to help you.’

  I try to say ‘How?’ but his finger prevents the framing of the word.

  ‘I’m going to make it a game. If you lose, you move in with me. If you win, you don’t.’

  He removes the finger.

  ‘I don’t understand. What sort of game? Cluedo? Chess?’

  ‘It doesn’t have a name. It’s a sex game, our favourite kind.’

  ‘Oh, good.’

  ‘The stakes are potentially high – for me at least. I’m going to set you a series of challenges. You don’t have to take them, but if you turn them down you incur a fail. You might find a scene or a person that attracts you more than I do – that’s the risk I’m taking. But if you don’t, and if you incur three fails, or decide to quit, you move in with me.’

  ‘Hang on. So – you’re going to send me off to have sex with various strangers or groups of strangers?’

  ‘Yeah, basically.’

  ‘And if I take them all on, I keep my flat?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘But if I chicken out or get fed up with all the shagging, I have to move in with you?’

  ‘Are you up for it? Do you dare?’

  Lloyd knows my weakness for a dare, the bastard. But it takes the pressure off me. All the tedious weighing up and sifting of pluses and minuses. Not to mention the fear. The fear is what really holds me back.

  ‘Would you be involved in these challenges?’

  ‘Sometimes, perhaps. Sometimes I’d just want your post-match report. You know I like hearing about your adventures. It turns me on.’

  I smile, thinking back to the days when I used to sit at his cocktail bar and tell him all about the threesome I’d just enjoyed, or whatever I’d been doing. I did it to wind him up, but obviously it had had a bigger effect than that.

  ‘You’re sure you’d be OK with it? You wouldn’t be jealous?’

  ‘When have I ever been jealous?’

  ‘Good point.’ Then some other words tumble out, slipping past my careful emotion-filter like undisciplined fish. ‘I wouldn’t ever want to hurt you.’

  He strokes my brow, smiling sadly. ‘That’s nice to know. That’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me. In fact, it might be the only sweet thing you’ve ever said to me.’

  ‘Fuck off. I’m not that bad.’

  ‘You are, my darling. You are very, very bad. That’s why I like you.’

  ‘OK. So, these challenges?’

  ‘I shall deliver one a week in a sealed envelope to your pigeonhole at the hotel. You will send me a reply, telling me whether it’s a go or not. Then, on your day off, you make it happen. I’ll design the challenges so that some kind of proof of your success gets back to me, if I’m not there to watch or take part. It could be anything from, say, performing in a strip club –’

  ‘Been there, done that.’

  ‘I see I shall have to use my imagination. Hmm. Anyway, it could involve fetishes, groups, unusual situations. Or it could be something very simple. I’ll have to give it some thought. Actually, I might do a bit of research now. Exactly what haven’t you done, Soph?’

  I puff my cheeks out. This is a tough question. ‘Most of the stuff I haven’t done is stuff I would never do.’

  ‘Right. But there are different ways of doing the things you have done. I’ll have to concentrate on those, I think. Multiple partners, S&M, sex in public, picking up strangers. All your favourites. Actually, fuck, you’ll pass this test with flying colours and then I’m shafted. Leave it with me. I’m going to come up with something fiendish.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure you will. You’ve yet to disappoint on that score.’

  ‘Thank you. Another compliment – twice in one day!’

  ‘Don’t get used to it.’

  ‘As if I would. Now, about that Dark Prince …’

  ***

  The very next evening, after work, the Princess presents herself to His Royal Highness the Prince of Petite Mort. She is belligerent and feisty, thrusting out her chest as she stands before him.

  ‘I demand an explanation,’ says the Prince, who is rather dashing in leather trousers and a sword belt, though the sword is only the plastic toy kind. The riding crop in his hand, however, is real. ‘Why did you run away to the forest?’

  ‘Because I didn’t want to marry a tyrant.’

  ‘Tyrant, eh? I’ll show you tyrant.’ He whacks the crop against his thigh, making a delicious whippy sound that melts the Princess’s resistance, not to mention her pussy. ‘Thought you could dishonour your pledge, did you? No such luck, my tempestuous beauty.’

  Smirk break. He does overegg it a bit sometimes.

  ‘You won’t be smiling for much longer. I’m going to continue with the marriage.’

  ‘Oh,
but –’

  ‘And you will bend to my will. And my whip.’

  ‘Yikes. But there’s something I must tell you. It might change your mind. I am no longer a virgin.’

  ‘Wha– but, you, what? No longer a virgin? How?’

  ‘The usual method, I think.’

  He cracks the whip again, then grabs me by the forearm and pulls me close, capturing my chin in a firm grip.

  ‘Who? I’ll have his head on a pike.’

  ‘I don’t know his name. Some peasant of the forest.’

  ‘He violated you?’

  ‘No, I wanted it. I begged him to deflower me.’

  ‘A peasant!’ The Dark Prince’s roar could wake the slumberers of neighbouring lands. ‘You gave your maidenhead to a peasant? Willingly?’

  ‘Aye. Still want me for your bride?’

  He yanks me over to the table and bends me over it, holding me down with a hand on my spine.

  ‘You’ll pay for your sluttish ways, my little whore princess. And yes, you will be my bride. I’m not giving up the chance to rule your father’s lands because you can’t keep your legs shut. Oh no. But you will learn not to repeat your loose behaviour, unless it’s in my bed.’

  God, he’s good at this. My juices gush and I squeeze my trembling thighs together. My blood is up and rioting through my veins. Do it, I silently beg him, whip me.

  The skirt comes up, petticoats and all, and I barely have time to screw my eyes shut before the first stroke whistles down, a bar of red heat lighting up my arse.

  My lusty yell is only partly one of pain. I am wild with exhilaration. The rougher he plays, the crazier I get. I wonder what it would take to break me, and if he’ll ever reach that point. The idea excites me even more.

  He wields the crop with an expert hand, laying a succession of hard, fast strokes until I want to jump up and hop about, but his other hand on my back holds me in place so that all I can do is take it. Stroke after stroke, burn after burn, while he rants and raves about what a whore I am and how I will submit to him and him alone.

  I don’t know how many he gives me, but it must be near fifty at least when he lays the crop aside and runs a hand over my scorched and welted bottom.

  ‘What did that teach you, Princess?’ he pants, sounding quite exhausted.

  ‘It taught me who my master is,’ I sigh.

  ‘Yes. That was my intention. So, I have conquered you?’

  ‘Oh, you have. It’s so sore, ouch.’

  His hand glides over the burning skin and then dips lower, to the wet ridges of my pussy, alighting on my needy clit.

  ‘You are in heat, Princess. The whipping has given you pleasure?’

  ‘No,’ I lie. ‘Only pain and humiliation.’

  ‘Then why are you so wet here? Are you truly a slut who wants cock all the time?’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘You are.’ He shoves two fingers up inside me. ‘And this is where you took peasant cock. How was it? Was he a good size?’

  ‘He was long and thick and he used it well.’

  He smacks my bum hard and I whimper and twist my hips.

  ‘I have decided that I will take your virginity, Princess.’

  ‘What? But …’

  One wetted fingertip slips between my rear cheeks until it finds the tight pucker it seeks.

  ‘There is more than one kind of virginity.’

  ‘Oh God. Not there. Please, not there.’

  ‘You should have thought of that when you welcomed peasant cock into your hungry cunt, Princess. I’m not going where some serf has been. I shall have to use an alternative. It won’t get me many heirs, I suppose, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come. To it.’

  Cold lubricant drips onto the tiny aperture. My hot arse welcomes it, but I am still nervous and focused, as I always am when Lloyd takes me this way. Somehow, it seems like a much bigger and bolder step than mere cock-in-cunt sex. There’s a momentous quality to it.

  But he knows I can take it, and he knows exactly how rough he can be, and that’s exactly how rough he is, shoving his cock firmly into my bottom until he is wedged tight and I have squealed and squirmed through the difficult moment of full penetration.

  ‘There we are, Princess,’ he whispers. ‘Your arse is stuffed with a royal cock. How does it compare with what that peasant gave you?’

  ‘I feel owned, sir, and taken.’

  ‘That’s what you should feel. That’s what you are.’

  He edges back and I cringe, then he thrusts himself to the hilt again.

  ‘Take it, my princess whore bride. Take my cock in your sore whipped arse and be grateful I wasn’t harder on you.’

  So I take it, gratefully and meekly, offering my most private and intimate place to the man who has mastered me.

  He uses it firmly while I finger my clit, loving the way my stomach bumps against the table with each forceful sheathing, glorying in the slap-slap of his pelvis against my burning bum cheeks.

  A good buggering always results in the kind of orgasm that makes me wonder if I’m actually dying and this one is no different. I am torn into pieces, floating about in space, while he finishes with a grunt and a spurt of warmth deep inside me.

  I reach blindly for his hand. He clasps mine and holds it tight while we recover, sighing and trembling over the table.

  ‘That learned ya, didn’t it?’ he says eventually, with a self-conscious chuckle.

  ‘It was incredible … just gets more incredible … every time.’ My wonderment is evident.

  ‘It does, doesn’t it? Makes you think.’

  ‘No, that’s what it doesn’t do. It makes me feel.’

  ‘You still want to go ahead with this challenge? Because we could just scrub it and you could move in tomorrow.’

  For a split second I consider saying yes, OK, let’s do that. Why can’t I say yes? I thought saying no was the thing I couldn’t do.

  Chapter Two

  He makes me wait two weeks for the first envelope.

  Two weeks of cajolery and attempted entrapment into spilling the sex beans – but Lloyd is not to be drawn. Even when I stopped wanking him, right on the teetering tip of orgasm, and told him I wanted to milk him for information before I milked him for anything else. Even when he entered the office to find me posing on top of the desk in corset, suspenders and stockings, promising great things in exchange for a clue. Even when I locked myself into a chastity device and told him that the key would only appear on receipt of certain intelligence.

  None of it worked.

  He finished himself off. He swept me off the desk and sent me away to dress, with a smack to my arse. He … well, he didn’t have to do anything about the last one. I got bored of it after about ten minutes.

  So now, two weeks after the deal was made, I am none the wiser about my first challenge.

  I am completing some induction training for a group of new kitchen staff when my PA, Kathleen, trots up to me and tells me that ‘Mr Ellison says there’s an important note for you in your pigeonhole’.

  I dismiss her, fling a bundle of leaflets and whatnot at the newbies and almost run out of Conference Room One towards the staffroom.

  In the internet age, the pigeonholes are only used now for payslips and birthday cards, but they still cover one wall with boxy wooden monotony.

  A couple of chambermaids are taking a tea break. They watch me march up to my mailbox and take out an A4 manila envelope. It’s quite thick. Nothing is written on the front.

  I nod at the maids and subdue my urge to rip the thing open there and then, taking it instead into the privacy of the office.

  The office, this quiet and sane oasis amid the hotel’s perma-bustle, always calms me. After a year, it’s lost all the associations I used to have with the former manager, Chase, and the stupid fixation I had with him. Now it belongs to me and Lloyd. Especially since the day we christened the desk …

  Sitting at it, I visualise us on top of it, me riding Lloyd energetically
while the stationery tipped over and fell on the carpet. It makes me smile.

  I am still smiling when I pick up the paperknife and make an elegant slit in the envelope. I tip it upside down on the desktop, watching its contents slide out.

  One sheet of Luxe Noir writing paper, one vellum business card.

  Dear Sophie

  Don’t ever tell me I’m not good to you. I’ve designed this first challenge around two of your favourite pursuits. One, of course, is sex. The other is photography. I don’t know what’s in your dark room these days, but one day I hope you’ll do your fixing and developing in our shared place of residence.

  A task with you behind the camera would be too easy, though. Where would be the challenge in that? No, what I’m asking you to do is swap places and become the model.

  The lady whose business card you will find in here is a highly regarded photographer who specialises in human sexuality. Her ‘thing’ is to capture the face at the moment of orgasm. Nice, eh? I’ve booked you in for a session.

  Call the number on the card when you get this letter and she’ll give you your appointment time, and directions to the studio.

  I think you’ll agree that this is a gentle, easy opening challenge for you. Nothing to scare a seasoned campaigner. Best of luck – and, of course, the evidence will reach me in the form of the completed photo set.

  I look forward to viewing it.

  Love

  Lloyd.

  I put the note down, waiting for the sinking feeling to hit the pit of my stomach before inhaling.

  Lloyd knows I hate having my photo taken.

  Ridiculous, isn’t it? It’s not as if I’m shy. I’ve put out and opened up for so many men. I’ve worn outrageous outfits. I’ve demonstrated sex toys at live events. I’ve even danced in a peep-show booth. But there’s something about the camera that scares me. It captures you, holds you in a moment, forces you to see yourself the way you are seen by others. I find that scrutiny very difficult to take. It reminds me to be self-conscious, something I rarely am. I don’t need the reminder.

  I have enough pictures of Lloyd to fill a gallery, but the only extant photographs of myself in the last two years are a head shot on the hotel website and a picture of my arse taken on his mobile phone.