Asteria - In Love with the Prince Page 11

  “Good,” said Jagor, his voice almost a rumble. “Because that would be a serious allegation. To even suggest that I was sleeping with Lucy....”

  “Of course not, Your Highness,” said Medenko. “That was the furthest thing from my mind.” His voice was like syrup. “I was merely voicing what others, who don’t know you as well as I, might think.”

  I felt Jagor’s shoe delicately stroke my bare thigh and come to rest on the front of my panties. I hadn’t forgotten his instruction, but...God, with Medenko sitting just a few feet from me? The fear of being caught was mingling with a building wave of heat, the two feeding each other. The foot prodded, gently but insistent. I took a deep breath, the air hissing around the hard length of him. Then I slipped my other hand down between my legs, letting him feel my fingers as they slipped into my panties. The foot withdrew.

  “Go on,” said Jagor – apparently aimed at both of us. I started to stroke myself with one hand. I was already wet.

  “She is very attractive, Your Highness.”

  “Oh, you think so?” That warning edge in his voice, again. I was still sucking, my mouth hot and tight around him, my hand stroking faster now.

  “I wasn’t meaning—I meant, one might notice that—” Medenko backpedalled furiously.

  “No, no,” Jagor told him. “I insist, Medenko. Please. Tell me why you think my aide is so attractive.” His voice wasn’t cruel: it was playful. My eyes widened. He wasn’t really going to have this conversation, was he?”

  Medenko relented: I could almost imagine him blushing – almost. I wished I could see his face. “People might notice that she has...very pleasing legs, Your Highness.”

  Really? My legs? I’d never thought of them like that. But hearing him say it, hearing them discuss me in such blatantly sexual terms, was causing the heat inside me to build faster and faster. I stroked Jagor hard now, my hand pumping up and down. I let the head slip from my mouth and rested my cheek on his warm thigh, kissing the side of the shaft as I stroked.

  “And what of the rest of her, Medenko?”

  “People might notice her breasts, Your Highness. Especially in the blouses you had your dresser buy for her.”

  “Yes, they are rather nice, aren’t they?” Jagor mused. I hissed out hot, angry breath around his shaft: I was outraged that he’d talk about me in that way, and immensely turned on. My fingers were sliding between my folds now, and it was difficult not to groan.

  Medenko was starting to relax, now: it was boy talk, bantering with his friend. “Lovely lips.”

  I could almost see Jagor tilting his head to one side. Raising his eyebrows. “Oh?”

  “Yes, they—” Medenko suddenly broke off, realizing he’d gone too far.

  Under the desk, I pumped Jagor’s cock furiously and slipped my mouth over the end again. Two fingers were inside me, and I was rubbing the crook of my hand against my clit. I was rapidly careening towards the edge, partially because I had a pretty good idea what Medenko was going to say.

  “Go on,” Jagor told him.

  “No, nothing, Your Highness,” Medenko said quickly.

  “No, please,” Jagor insisted. “Tell me about Lucy’s lips.”

  Medenko hummed and hawed for a few seconds, but eventually said in a rush, “It is difficult to talk to her, Your Highness, and not imagine one’s cock between them.”

  This man I’d been so scared of, who ruled the retinue with an iron fist, had spent every meeting wanting me. When he’d talked to me alone in Monaco, rattling me badly about what he might know about Jagor and me, he’d actually been thinking about me sucking him. I didn’t know whether to be humiliated that he thought of me in that way, or turned on by it. I’d never realized that I had that sort of power over men. The revelation left me teetering on the edge, and then Jagor pushed me over.

  “I don’t think that’s at all appropriate, Medenko. Might I remind you that Miss Snow is our honored guest and my personal aide.” His foot tapped my leg again: three times, fast. Telling me to go faster. Being ordered like that while I was wearing a slave collar...the significance wasn’t lost on me. As I stroked him faster, his length throbbing and ready under my touch, as my tongue lashed over and around the head, he said, “Lucy is my aide: nothing more and nothing less. She is here because I want her here, and you and everyone else need no more explanation that that. She’s a fine, upstanding woman and she’d be horrified by some of the things you’re suggesting. Let me assure you, she’s nothing but a consummate professional.”

  And suddenly I was coming, hot clenching spasms that I couldn’t voice, that I had to bottle up tight and let explode silently within me. At the same time Jagor was shooting into my mouth, and I swallowed quickly, until he was still under my lips. I slowly drew my head off him and rested my cheek on his thigh. I’d never felt so at ease, or so shell-shocked. It was like staring at one of those illusions with the two black faces, where you suddenly see the inverse and glimpse the white candlestick between them. I’d been thinking of slaves as women forced and suffering. I hadn’t been seeing it through Asterian eyes, in a land where sex wasn’t evil or dirty. It was the women who chose their master, who had every man lusting after them. Viewed that way, they – I – was the one with the power.

  ***

  When Medenko had gone, and I’d crawled out from under the desk – flushed, panting, with my skirt up around my waist – Jagor took me in his arms again. As I wrapped myself around him, I could feel the collar, the thin fabric between our necks. I was gaining an appreciation for the subtleties of it now. Having a collar – as opposed to a ring or an armband – meant you felt it whenever you moved, and especially when you went to embrace someone. You couldn’t forget what you were.

  ***

  I spent the rest of the day in the guise of a palace slave, working for the Prince. Subtly different to being his slave, and utterly alien to me.

  I walked behind him through every doorway. I sat – or in one case, knelt – until I was needed. There was nothing overtly sexual, but I could feel Jagor’s eyes stroking me when he had the chance. Most of the time, though, I was sitting beside him: it was the eyes of the other men we met that took in my business suit, my bowed head and my palace collar.

  In some ways it was normal – when we had a working lunch, I ate. When Jagor needed help with translation or had some question regarding the UN, I assisted. The rest of the time, I sat quietly. I served coffee a few times, but then I’d done that in the US, as the youngest or least experienced person in the room – sometimes, even, because I’d been a woman. In fact, thinking back to those experiences, this was in some ways much less disturbing. In those meetings, as an office junior, men had looked at my body and used it to judge me as a person: if I had a short skirt on, I must be an easy lay; if it was a long skirt, I was frigid, and either way I was a woman and so lousy at my job. Here, sex and work were separate: the men could appreciate my looks without letting it cloud anything else. As soon as I translated or offered an opinion, they treated me with the same respect they’d give a man.

  At least, the Asterian men did.

  Towards the end of the day, we met with an all-male Russian delegation, and I translated while watching them letch quite openly over me. When it was over, the Russian diplomat told me – he didn’t speak to me, just told me what to tell the Prince – how much he liked the subservience of Asterian women, and how he wished they behaved so in Russia. He’d misunderstood Asteria in the same way I had. None of them would choose you, I thought darkly, even as I translated his words.

  It only sank in later that, the entire day, no one had questioned that I was Asterian.

  Chapter Nine

  A week passed like that. It was difficult to grab time alone with Jagor: with the King in hospital, he worked long hours dealing with trade and labor problems – the palladium mines were so critical to the country’s economy, any problem had to be dealt with immediately. I accompanied him as a slave to meetings in the day, treasuring the sligh
test touch – the way he’d let his leg brush mine in an elevator, or lean over my shoulder to check a document I was working on, close enough that I could feel his warmth. We were never alone.

  Then, on the fourth day, he had a phone call with the French president. We were alone in his study, and halfway through the call he pushed back from his desk and motioned me atop him. Silently, I unzipped his trousers and rolled a condom onto him. I lifted my skirt, pushed my panties to one side and slowly lowered myself onto him, biting my lip as he filled me to keep from crying out. I rode him with tiny, delicate movements: no more than an inch of motion. He undid my blouse, pushed up my bra and palmed my breasts, the phone cradled in his shoulder. We had to move so slowly and quietly, it lasted half an hour, and when my climax broke, it made me shudder and gasp so hard that he had to clamp his hand over my mouth.

  In the second week, the King came home. He was a huge, jolly man – Jagor’s build but a little softer around the edges. He had a thick, pointed beard and a booming laugh; I liked him immediately.

  With his father home, Jagor relaxed a little more – the statesman disappeared and the playboy returned. He was as eager as I was for things to resume. With both of us in Asteria, though, I wasn’t sure when that would be. One night around nine, when we were alone for a moment in a corridor, he suddenly grabbed me and pushed me face-first up against the wall, kissing my neck just above the collar. I went from zero to sixty in no seconds flat; I was red-faced and panting, his huge hands cupping my ass through my tight skirt, my nipples hard as they rasped against the wall under my thin blouse. “We can’t!” I hissed. “Someone will come!”

  “I need to be alone with you,” he told me.

  “I know!”

  He hesitated. “There’s a place. Somewhere the bodyguards don’t go.”

  “Where?” If he’d said Antarctica, I would have leapt in a plane with him.

  “There’s a club...a sex club. Very discreet, but—”

  “What?”

  “To the people inside, you’d be there as my slave. Are you ready for that?”

  I thought for a few seconds. It was this, or perhaps not be alone with him again for weeks, maybe until we left Asteria. And who knew when that would be? “I’m ready.”

  ***

  Jagor faked an urgent phone call, and we drove there with two of the bodyguards. It was past ten when we arrived. I’d been expecting a neon sign and a dark doorway, but we stopped outside a modern skyscraper.

  “Stay in the car,” he told the bodyguards and, for once, they let him go in unaccompanied. I went to follow him. “You too, Lucy,” he told me. “I don’t need you for this.” And he was gone, striding confidently inside the building.

  I was completely lost. What the hell was going on? “Is he safe in there, alone?” I asked Arno. He was my favorite of all the bodyguards: more talkative than the rest of them.

  “Hendel – he owns the building – has his own security. Doesn’t let anyone else in but his guests, even us. He’s obsessed with privacy. He screens visitors probably better than we do.”

  “What is it?” I asked, looking up at the green glass tower.

  “Hendel imports luxury goods. Alcohol, mainly. Things you can’t get in Asteria. There’s a private bar in there, too, and a club, in the basement. The rich go there.”

  A few minutes later, Arno’s phone rang. He spoke, and I realized it was Jagor on the other end. “He wants you to go in,” Arno told me. “Hendel is having some problem with Russian caviar – the Prince thinks you can help translate. Sixteenth floor.”

  I nodded, and got out. Jagor should have been an actor: even I’d believed that he didn’t want me there.

  He was waiting for me inside, of course. We got into an elevator, and he slotted in a keycard. We didn’t go up, to Hendel’s office: we went down. My stomach knotted.

  Jagor turned me away from him and slid a key into the palace collar’s padlock. Click. The thing came loose, and he rolled it up and pushed it into a pocket. I stood there as he placed a much thicker, metal collar around my neck. He hesitated before he locked it around my neck. “Lucy,” he said softly, “This is just for tonight. And you can still use the ring. Understand?”

  I nodded.

  “No. Tell me you understand.” He sounded worried.

  “I understand.”

  Clu-click. And it was on – a heavy, solid band in some polished silver metal, padded inside with black leather. I looked at myself in the mirrored wall. A metal ring hung from the front and, above it, a symbol I recognized. The seal of the Prince of Asteria.

  ***

  When we reached the basement, he had me strip down to my bra, panties, stockings and heels and stuffed the rest of my clothes into a locker. Then he took something from a hook by the door – a long strip of heavy black leather. It was only when I saw the clip at one end that I realized it was a leash.

  I watched dumbly as he clipped it onto the ring on the front of my collar. “As far as anyone knows,” he told me, “You’re one of my slaves – an Asterian I’ve collared.”

  I nodded, and then we were inside.

  It reminded me of a high-end vodka bar. It was big, and disorienting: the walls were all glossy black, so they seemed to fall away in the distance. It was as dark as a nightclub, but without the flashing lights – just soft, indirect glows from lights built into recesses. Strangely, there was no music. The floor was dark, polished wood, with tiny white lights sunk into it, lighting the edges of different areas. There were armchairs and stools everywhere, all finished in soft white leather. I saw some bigger padded areas, too, the size of king-size beds.

  The place was packed, the men mostly in suits, though a few of them had stripped off. The women were either in their underwear or naked – and every one of them was wearing a collar. Some had their hands bound behind their backs.

  None of that, though, was what shocked me: I think I’d been expecting something at least along those lines. What shocked me was the atmosphere of the place. Raw and sexual in a way that hit me right in my core. People came here for one reason...and I was a slave, right in the middle of it. I thought back to the dress shop in Monaco, the way the bodyguards had looked at me. I could feel it now, the heat of the male attention as I was led, on a leash, past hundreds of them. Not everyone was in a couple, I saw. There were quite a lot of men who seemed to be on their own, and my stomach tightened at the implications of that.

  I quickly realized that being on a leash has more subtleties than I’d thought. People imagine being hauled along like a disobedient dog, but it’s not like that at all. In five inch heels, on a slippery wood floor, being pulled would yank you right off your feet. To avoid it, you have to keep pace exactly with your owner, so that there’s just a tiny bit of slack in the leash. That means you can’t dawdle, can’t look around or be distracted. You have to be in position and attentive at all times: that’s what it’s all about. If you’re doing it properly, the leash might as well not be there. It hit me with a little shock that I was actually taking pride in following correctly. What the hell was I turning into?

  Jagor gave me some Asterian money and sat while I went to the bar for him. Given that all the men who had slaves sent them to the bar, that meant that the only men at the bar were guys who’d come on their own. I expected them to accost me, but they just stood there, taking their time and sipping their drinks, while the slaves came and went with orders. It took me a while to figure it out: they couldn’t just approach us – etiquette seemed to be that they had to talk to our owners and ask to speak to us or – my stomach flipped over – to borrow us. So they waited at the bar to check out the slaves, then followed one back to her owner if they were interested.

  As I ordered Jagor’s obscenely expensive imported whiskey, I could feel their gaze sliding up my legs, over my ass, up my back. Some of them leaned right up against the bar so that they could get a side view - and I realized that there were mirrors above the bar, tilted down, so that even the men standi
ng behind us could see our fronts. We were displayed for their delectation, and the idea of that twisted around inside me in a way that left me both panicky and hot. I saw other slaves depart with their drinks, some followed, some not. When I left with mine, three men drifted along with me.

  I returned to Jagor, feeling their eyes on me with every step. He took his drink and indicated a white leather cushion on the floor. I knelt on it, head bowed, hands loosely behind my back. Doracella had taught me well.

  The men arrived, just a few steps behind me. Three sets of feet in expensive shoes. One of them hesitated and then walked away, upon seeing that it was the Prince. The other two bowed.

  “Your Highness,” said one. “You honor us with your presence.”

  Jagor sat back in his chair. “Hendel is an old friend.”

  “I had heard rumors, Your Highness, that you didn’t choose to keep slaves.”

  I caught my breath. That was something I’d been wanting to ask, ever since that first conversation about Asteria. Did he have a harem of slaves somewhere?

  “I rarely get the opportunity,” Jagor said, answering without answering. His hand came down and lazily caressed my hair.

  “I’m glad you did this evening, Your Highness,” said the other. “Your slave is quite lovely. A new acquisition?”

  “A temporary arrangement.”

  “Would you consider lending her?”

  My heart rose, even though I knew the answer would be “No”.

  But Jagor hesitated, and my heart leapt into my mouth. I had to keep silent, but I could feel my pulse hammering, my eyes locked with cold fear on the toes of the men in front of me – I couldn’t even see their faces! And it was entirely possible that he would lend me – certainly, sharing lovers seemed to be more the norm than the exception, here.

  “We’ll take excellent care of her, of course. Would you like to watch?”