The Slaves of New York Read online

  Kim hadn't thought of it that way before. She had been rather embarrassed about her reaction to the books and had thought it was something particular in her that she wasn't very keen to discuss.

  'Yes, yes you are,' she said. 'To tell you the truth I was finding it hard to come to terms with.'

  'Right. I mean, it's not something you really want to admit, is it? Doesn't mean you can't have fantasies though, right? I've read every one of his books and I can tell you some of those scenes I know by heart.' The woman grinned. Her whole face was animated. 'Actually, I have a theory that the more up-front and independent a woman is the more likely she is to be attracted to the submission thing. You know there's that old cliché about the most powerful men always being the ones who go to hookers to be treated like shit. Perhaps it's the same with women.'

  'Could be, I suppose.'

  'But I thought Jake Ashley never gave interviews.'

  'He doesn't. I'm just hoping to persuade him.'

  'Christ, just talking about it makes me go all squirmy right here.' The woman pressed her fingers into her belly. She was wearing a white blouse and Kim noticed her nipples had suddenly hardened, their contours outlined under the material. 'Do you think it's all based on his experiences?'

  'That was going to be my first question,' Kim said. The plane began to descend. The pilot announced that they were going to be landing in approximately ten minutes. 'But it might just be in his imagination. That's what a writer is supposed to do, after all; imagine things.'

  'I don't believe anyone could write like that unless they've experienced it. All the detail, all the equipment the master uses...' She shuddered, her eyes turned inward for a moment accessing a private memory.

  'But he writes about the women's emotions as accurately as what the masters feel. That's pure imagination. He's not a woman.'

  'You're right. He certainly knows women. He knows exactly what makes them tick sexually. But I guess that's because he's been there, he's had them as his slaves. He just couldn't write like that otherwise.'

  'So what, you think he's got a chateau?' The eleven books that Ashley had written all feature the same male protagonist, a rich businessmen who had built a French chateau in New England.

  'Possible, I suppose. But he's certainly got punishment rooms. And he's certainly done most of the stuff he writes about.'

  'Perhaps he tries it all out on his wife, or a willing girlfriend?'

  'Could be. It's a funny thing, isn't it?'

  'What is?'

  'Fantasy. Sexual fantasy. I mean, there's lots of stuff in his books - bondage, whippings, nipple clamps - that would be really painful. But when you read about it you don't think about the pain. Only the pleasure it seems to bring.' The woman licked her upper lip very slowly with the tip of her tongue. 'Have you ever tried it?

  'No. Never.'

  'But you have fantasised about it?'

  Kim turned to look at the woman. 'Yes, I suppose so,' she said vaguely. The truth was that she had masturbated at least three or four times imagining herself as one of Ashley's heroines, tied and bound with a large dildo forced into her sex as the master applied a whip to her buttocks. But she didn't want to admit that - even to herself.

  'Have you ever thought of going further.'

  'Further?'

  'There're contact magazines in New York. There's a lot of ads for submissives.'

  'I'm not sure I'd really enjoy it.'

  'You never know until you've tried.' Her eyes turned inward again.

  'And you? Have you tried?'

  'That's a long story.'

  'Which sounds like you have.'

  'I got scared.'

  'Scared of getting hurt?'

  'No. Scared because I'd liked it too much. Actually I was always into all sorts of sex. I used to be married. But my husband was very conservative when it came to sex. He doesn't even like it if I wear stockings and a garter belt. Thought that was kinky. He'd have gone apeshit if I told him I wanted to be tied to the bed and whipped. It was easier to get a divorce.' She laughed. 'Hey, we're nearly down.'

  Kim had a feeling there was a lot the woman was not telling her. There was a grinding noise as the landing gear was lowered and a few minutes later the plane landed on the tarmac with a squeal of rubber.

  'Ladies and gentleman,' the stewardess said over the tannoy, 'welcome to New York.'

  Kim paid off the yellow cab she had taken in from the airport and allowed the doorman to take her single suitcase into the Monument Hotel on W45th Street. The hotel was a five-storey nineteenth century building with a huge forty-storey skyscraper on one side and a vacant lot on the other. It was not particularly salubrious but again Kim had to be careful with her expenses. When she got home they would be minutely examined.

  She was tired after the flight and as soon as she had been shown up to her tiny room, with a small en suite shower cubicle, and unpacked, she stripped off all her clothes, took a quick shower, and got into bed. Though it was eight o'clock in New York her body clock was set to London time where it was two in the morning.

  But sleep did not come. The room had a primitive air conditioning unit poking through the lower half of the window, but it was too noisy to have on all night. Without it however the room soon become muggy and hot. As she lay listening to the wailing sirens that seemed to be as frequent as the subway trains rumbling below her, she thought about what the woman on the plane had said. Jake Ashley's writings had certainly got through to her. She seemed normal enough, whatever normal meant, but behind that smartly dressed elegant facade she was actually entertaining fantasies about being a sexual slave and had hinted that she'd tried it in reality. She wondered how many other women felt the same way. Perhaps that explained why the books were so popular. They certainly had a market well beyond the small core of devotees of such outré practices, which is why she'd suggested to her editor that an interview with the reclusive Jake Ashley would be a good idea.

  But her own reaction to what she had read was more ambiguous. The Disciple was about a Dolores Salgardo, a young secretary who had started to work for one of Piers Blanchard's companies. Piers, the master featured in every book in the series, had noticed her immediately and set about introducing her to the arcane world of submission and domination. Soon Dolores was being bound and whipped for the entertainment of the master's friends, and discovering that her sexuality blossomed under such treatment. She was also expected to have sex with the other female slaves to please her master, and found that though she had never been with a woman before, it too turned her on. If Kim were absolutely truthful with herself she was appalled at the idea that any woman should want to be totally and absolutely submissive to a man. On the other hand, the descriptions of the emotions that Dolores had felt as she dressed in incredibly tight satin basques and glossy stockings, had her feet strapped into dauntingly high heels and her sex shaved in preparation for meeting her master, were undoubtedly arousing. At the 'chateau' the slaves were subjected to a punishing regimen. All their choices were removed; what they wore, what they did, even when they were allowed to eat, and there was something exciting about that too. It was a world where nothing else existed but the nexus of sex.

  Kim realised her hand had slipped down to her belly and was clutching the curved mound of her mons, her middle finger slipping into her labia. Her labia were wet.

  'Damn,' she said aloud.

  She pulled her hand away and rolled onto her side, but it was too late. Kim always slept in the nude, and her nipples tingled with excitement. She moved an arm across her breasts, pressing them back against her chest to try to calm the feelings they were generating, but this only made matters worse. She felt her clitoris throb and her vagina squirm. She rolled onto her back and stared up at the ceiling as a siren wailed out across the city, so close it might have been right outside.

  'No,' she said to herself.

  But she stripped the single sheet off and turned on the bedside light. She looked down at her naked body. Kim w
as slim with a narrow waist, a flat stomach and long sculptured legs, their firm muscles toned up by weekly sessions in her local health club. Her complexion was olive-skinned and her mons was covered with a thick bush of black hair that she trimmed regularly into a perfectly neat triangle.

  She reached over to the bedside table where she had left her makeup case. Flipping the top open she reached inside. Carefully hidden under the little plastic wallet where she kept her lipsticks, nail varnish and eye shadow, was a large flesh-coloured dildo. She pulled it out. She had left The Disciple on the bedside table too, and picked it up. She held the book open with her right hand and pushed the dildo between her legs with her left.

  Dolores was trembling as Monica fitted the leather blindfold over her eyes. It was padded on the inside and moulded around the bridge of her nose, cutting out the slightest hint of light. They had cinched her into a waspie girdle in red satin, lacing it so tightly she was having trouble breathing. Its long ruched satin suspenders pulled the glossy sheer black stockings taut. She wore long red satin gloves and her arms had been drawn behind her back, her wrists bound there with two thin leather straps, one at her wrists and the other just above her elbows. This pulled her shoulders back and her chest out, her big pear-shaped breasts hanging over the front of the corset, each nipple circled by a black clamp, the puckered flesh so tightly squeezed by the jaws it was white. The clamps were joined by a thin gold chain.

  Monica stood back to admire her work. She was a short woman with razor cut black hair who looked as if she spent hours in the gym pumping iron, her muscles hard and well defined, almost like a female bodybuilder. She was wearing a leather bra and leather shorts, though the bra was totally unnecessary as her breasts were almost completely flat. She took Dolores's arm and pulled her out of what the girl had come to think of as her cell. She pinched spitefully at Dolores's flesh. In the days since she had arrived at the chateau Monica had never missed an opportunity to make her life, and the life of all the other slaves, uncomfortable. And as the master's overseer, charged with looking after the slaves, she had plenty of opportunity to do just that. They walked along the corridor, then turned into another room.

  'Very pretty.' It was the master's voice.

  'Do you want her gagged?' Monica asked.

  'No. I don't think that will be necessary, will it Dolores?'

  'No, master.' The word still made her shiver with excitement.

  'Walk forward a few steps, child,' he ordered.

  The girl tottered forward on her high-heeled shoes, still, after a week at the chateau, unaccustomed to their height. She stopped, sensing she was right in front of her master, the musky cologne he wore filling her nostrils.

  'Tonight we are going to try something new.' She had long black hair that had been washed and brushed out over her shoulders by one of the other slaves. He stroked it gently as if he really cared about her. The gesture of tenderness made Dolores's heart beat faster.

  Kim trapped the vibrator between her thighs, enabling her to turn it on with her left hand and not put the book down. She gripped the shaft again and forced it hard against her clitoris.

  Dolores felt his hand slip down to her belly. Briefly it dallied with her sex, a single finger pushed into her labia. She was shaven every day now, strapped onto a specially designed table with her buttocks raised and her legs splayed so far apart she thought she might be split in two. One of the other slaves shaved her over and over again until her labia and the whole plain of her sex was as smooth as the nap of a rose. She knew he would be able to feel the sticky juices that had escaped her vagina.

  'I want you to stand with your legs apart.'

  She did what she was told immediately. After a week at the chateau she had learned that any hesitation was punished severely. Six bright red weals crisscrossed her buttocks as proof of that.

  Monica was slotting a metal bar under her arms, so it rested across the back of her shoulders. She clipped the ends of the bar to two chains hanging down from a complicated gearing of pulleys overhead. She wound a leather strap around Dolores's body just under her breasts and over her arms so the metal bar was trapped in place. Then Monica pulled down another metal bar attached to the pulley arrangement by a single chain. There was a thick leather cuff at each end of the bar, which she buckled tightly around Dolores's ankles.

  Suddenly there was a whirr of electric motors and Dolores felt the metal bar under her arms hauling her into the air. She gasped in surprise. As she dangled in mid-air she heard the motors whirr again, and this time her ankles were raised, pulled up behind her until her body was horizontal, her breasts pointing at the floor. She felt her body swaying slightly from side to side. She had never felt so completely powerless, her body bound more tightly than it ever had been before. The sensation made her hot with excitement.

  Kim managed to hold the book in front of her face and rub her upper arm against her right breast at the same time. Her nipple tingled. The humming of the vibrator filled the air, her clitoris pulsing with delicious sensations.

  Dolores heard something being moved, its feet scraping the floor. Then there was the odd clicking noise that the ratchet of the crank made, and she felt herself being lowered. When the movement stopped she was sure she could feel hot breath fanning her thighs, her sex suspended above someone's face.

  She felt a hand seize her head and pulled it forward onto a large, pulsing erection. Though she had never been allowed this privilege before she knew instinctively it was her master, and gobbled it deep into her mouth, wanting to show him how eager she was to please. Almost immediately she felt another sensation that made her gasp. A tongue, hot and wet, was forcing itself into her vagina, as hands wrapped themselves around her nylon-sheathed thighs, to steady her.

  'How pretty,' the master said. He took her cheeks in his hands and pulled her head back until the ridge at the base of his glans was held between her lips. She felt his cock throb.

  'Take the blindfold off, Monica,' the master said.

  Dolores blinked as the blindfold fell away. She saw the master standing in front of her, his thickly haired body naked but for a purple silk robe that was draped from his shoulders. She looked down. Lying on a bench under her body was one of the slaves. She was naked, her face buried between Dolores's thighs, her tongue working on Dolores's clit.

  'No,' Dolores tried to scream, the word muffled on her master's cock. She had never even been touched there by a woman, let alone had a woman kissing and sucking at her so intimately, and the idea had always revolted her. She tried to struggle and pulled herself away, but the master's hand at the back of the neck, and the girl's hands on her thighs, held her firm.

  The master nodded at Monica, who immediately moved forward, stooped down and took Dolores's left breast in her hand. She unclipped the nipple clamp and replaced it with her mouth.

  'Does that feel good, child?'

  Dolores managed to pull her mouth off his cock. 'No, master, please no. Don't let them do this to me.' Of course she'd always known this moment would come, and hoped that somehow she would be able to control her repugnance. All she wanted was to serve her master, to obey his commands, but she couldn't stand this.

  Kim spread her thighs apart and moved the dildo down between them. She found the mouth of her vagina. The vibrations made the wet flesh oscillate wildly, providing a whole new raft of sensations.

  'You have to obey.'

  'Please, please...'

  But as she struggled to push herself away from the invading tongue something happened. Instead of the revulsion that had been making her skin crawl, she suddenly felt a hot flush of pleasure. Deep inside her vagina she could feel a new flow of juices running down the velvety walls and her clitoris throbbed violently. She found herself pressing down against the bonds, hoping to get the tongue to go deeper. Her nipple too, clamped firmly in Monica's mouth, was delivering the most exquisite sensations. The master took hold of her hair and pulled her face up to look at him.

  'Well, child?'
he asked.

  'Oh master, master...' was all she could say. The girl's tongue was flicking her clit artfully from side to side.

  The master smiled. He pushed her mouth back onto his phallus. She sucked it eagerly, trying to make sure the soaring pleasures that were seizing every part of her body were somehow concentrated in her mouth, so he would feel her passion. She wanted him to come. She wanted to feel his spunk and swallow it greedily. She had never wanted anything more in her life.

  'I'm coming,' she tried to tell him, her lips moving against this hard flesh, the words barely audible. Her body shuddered. Her cunt contracted. Her clitoris pulsed as the girl's tongue pressed it back against the underlying bone.

  'Master...'

  Kim dropped the book and used her left hand to cup the mound of her pubis, her finger pressing her clitoris. She thrust the dildo deep into her sex, feeling the hard phallus drive right up into her soaking wet vagina. She was coming before it was fully embedded, her whole body trembling. As the feelings cascaded out of her she saw, in her mind's eye, the woman on the plane, the way her fingers had pressed into her belly, her hardened nipples under the white blouse and the way her tongue had licked the upper lip of that fleshy, sensuous mouth. And she saw Jake Ashley's eyes staring up from the cover of the book, watching them both.

  'Hi, can I speak to Candy Brook please?'

  'This is she.'

  'Oh hi, my name's Kim Holbrook. You don't know me. I'm a friend of Johnny Danton.'

  'Hey, great, how is he?'

  Though the idea for a story on Jake Ashley had come from her, she would never have put it up to her editor without being able to tell him that she had at least some prospect of tracking Jake Ashley down. But a few weeks after first coming up with the idea she had interviewed the film director Johnny Danton about his new project. The subject had turned to Ashley and it turned out that Danton had been trying to get distribution companies interested in filming the first of Ashley's books. They had shied away from the idea, however, despite his insistence that it would not be pornography but a genuine attempt to look at human sexuality.