Chapter One

 

Alanna's cheeks were flushed, but it wasn't with the cool breezes blowing across the field. She gave every impression of being a proper Scottish lady of the castle, granddaughter of Laird Ferguson of Castle Fergus, dealing responsibly with masons she had hired to repair some stonework along the east wall.

She was dressed in an almost ankle-length skirt, with flat, suede boots beneath. Her blouse was beige and modest, and she had a thick, hip-length black cardigan over it. Her red hair was drawn loosely back in a long braid, and her language was respectful, but clearly determined as she gave them instructions on what she wanted.

She gave a parting nod and turned to walk away - carefully, cursing Nathan Hunter under her breath for his perversity and obstinacy, for his arrogance and plain old bossiness! Who was he to dare to give her orders anyway!?

More irritatingly, why was she obeying them?

The man was like an addiction! The more terrible, wicked things he made her do the more exhilarated she became to do more! Didn't drugs stimulate the pleasure centers of a person's brain? And wasn't that precisely what Nathan Hunter was doing!?

God knew she had never felt such intensity of heat and arousal as she had with Nathan. The things the man did and wanted her to do were shocking to her otherwise modest Scottish sensibilities. They certainly would have been astonishing to the locals who regarded her with somewhat possessive pride. They had gotten used to her being the Laird's heir, after all. They liked her and respected her.

That sort of thing might not be important in the cities, but here in Northern Scotland they were still quite a traditional lot.

Nathan regarded that as a strange, and somewhat silly cultural quirk, and it amused him to flout it wherever possible.

Thus today she wore his latest purchase (from where she had no idea) which consisted of a set of leather straps held together by stainless steel rings squeezing in tightly around her slender body. It was an absurd thing. She'd laughed at it in disbelief when he'd proudly shown it to her.

"Wear it, slave girl," he'd ordered.

"I am not your slave girl," she had replied in a frosty tone, as she generally did.

"Wear it anyway. It will make the day more lively."

The thin black straps crossed her shoulders to attach to rings at the top of her breasts. Four straps, attached, again, by rings, were then drawn in firmly about the base of both breasts, squeezing them somewhat. The pressure was enough to keep it constantly at the back of her mind, no matter what she was doing, and to prevent her breasts from moving about too noticeably.

But it also had the effect of making her breasts pulse as her heart beat, and kept her nipples in a state of firm erection. And while the straps did keep her breasts from moving too much that was not to say they didn't move at all. With her blouse tucked in neatly this caused her erect nipples to rub against her blouse.

The straps around her breasts were attached to ones which went behind her back, pulling in firmly, and others which went down her body, in a diamond pattern, leading to a strap which was larger than the others that served to cover her between the legs. That strap narrowed as it passed up between her buttocks, then joined to the others again at her back.

The leather was tight everywhere, and that included between the legs. The strap there squeezed up against her sex in a way which should have been unpleasant, but in the context of the arousal she was now dealing with, was something else again. It didn't help that the inside of that leather strap had, attached, a pair of dildos which pushed up into her body.

Further, the thicker strap which went over her sex was joined to the narrower one which led to it by one of the metal rings. This ring was cleverly placed to be directly over her clitoris, the metal pressing into her body around it serving to make her clitoris swell outward from under its hood.

To further enhance the effect, there as a tiny spiked metal ball dangling from a half inch ring and resting directly against her clitoris. It bounced and shifted, turned and ground against her as she moved as a constant reminder, as Nathan had said, that she was now his 'sex slave'.

Awful man!

He had finished off his 'creation' by taking a pair of small black silk ribbons and tying tiny black bows around her nipples!

All this she wore under her more normal, more respectable outer clothing, and she felt, as she walked around, like some sort of costumed character, pretending to be something on the surface which was utterly at odds with what lay beneath.

Her commonsense personality thought it all horribly silly, and yet even so she could not dismiss the bubbling, simmering arousal she felt even as she went about her quite ordinary tasks and chores. The things she had on under the surface were continual physical reminders of the dark, thrilling sex she and Nathan had had the previous night, and would have again tonight!

She'd only known him little more than a week, and yet when she was around him she felt a sense of breathlessness, a tightness to her chest and a fluttering in her stomach, none of which she truly understood. After all, she'd loved Niall, and been engaged to marry him before he'd died. But he'd never made her feel so breathless.

And she wasn't even sure how she felt about Nathan, at least, emotionally. Sexually, well, that was an entirely different story. The man was overpowering in more ways than one, and had taken her to heights of pleasure she had not even been aware existed!

She felt a tingling, burning ache of pleasure between the legs as she moved, as she walked across the field and the little spiked ball moved against her clitoris, as her nipples rubbed delicately against her blouse and she felt the tightness of the straps squeezing against her sex and breasts.

And she remembered his stern admonition before he'd left.

"You are not permitted to have an orgasm," he had told her.

As if! She'd been open-mouthed with indignation that he would dare to make such a statement! And yet at the same time, it was the very outrageousness of the things he said and did which helped inspire such heat within her mind.

Yes, it was outrageous! He was acting as if she were his prisoner (her mind flashed to that first time shackled in the dungeon, naked), as if she were his helpless sexual plaything (her mind flashed to the sight of the floor of the hidden passageway as he had carried her, bound and naked, slung across his shoulder)!

It was all so darkly thrilling! She'd grown up around the castle, spent time in the ancient dungeons fantasizing what it must have been like so many centuries ago, even picturing herself as a prisoner in those dungeons (no doubt to a cruel but handsome lord who wanted to ravish her!).

Her girlish daydreams had grown into secret fantasies that had only come out with Nathan in the dungeon. He had tapped into them and spread them like the unfurling blossom of a dark rose, and she had found herself living out a dark imitation of those wild fantasies in ways she had never imagined.

Niall had been a good lover, and had known what to do with her body, well, when he tried. But Nathan didn't just caress her body, he caressed her mind. He had said so explicitly, tapping his finger against her forehead and saying there lay the most important erotic organ on a woman. Yet knowing he was deliberately playing to her dark fantasies did little to diminish the effect.

It had been two hours since she'd gone down to breakfast with he and her grandfather, wearing his absurd collection of straps and... and things under her clothes. She'd felt wicked at the time, and still did, and her body had been bubbling along on a low to medium heat that entire time.

Ordered her not to have an orgasm! Of all the bloody cheek!

First of all was his presumption that simply wearing this silly getup would get her so aroused she would have an orgasm in the first place. Then, came the temerity to think he could order her to not have one!

But, damn the man, while she wasn't close to orgasm her body's cravings had grown to the extent she was having difficulty resisting the temptation to find somewhere quiet to relieve the ever-present sexual tension.

And no matter what she did, if he found out, he'd be smug about it! If she had to masturbate in the middle of the bloody day because of his straps and things that would make him smug. If she held off and didn't, then he'd smugly think she'd obeyed him!

Bloody American!

"You're my slut, remember," he'd said.

He knew very well what effect that word had on her! Alanna had spent much of her teen years being the 'good girl'. She was much in the spotlight, so had little choice. Anything she did which was improper would have been noted and passed on.

Several years back she'd gone swimming in southern Spain, and like many young European girls there she'd done so in a thong - and topless. The tabloids had somehow gotten a picture! How utterly humiliating that had been! Her family had practically disowned her, and watched her even more closely after that, forbidding any holidays to southern destinations.

Alanna Ferguson was most definitely the furthest thing from a slut! But in the throes of passion he'd made her say otherwise. And he'd taunted her about it ever since, despite how she sometimes fumed.

Yet when once again in the throes of passion he'd made her proclaim it, repeatedly!

Bastard! Arrogant ... male!

Well, what he didn't know, he couldn't use against her.