Dodge didn't seem too bad for an owner, but Barry was the only man who treated her like she was a human being. She was grateful for that more than for any specific help or favor that he extended.

"Your lessons helped a lot," she said, "but I learned a couple of new tricks from another slave last night. I think you'll like them."

"Now I'm really looking forward to tomorrow."

As usual, Barry tidied her cell while she showered and brushed her teeth.

After she dried off, he examined every part of her and p.r.o.nounced her fit for service.

Dodge stopped by at noon and brought some lunch for her.

"You did well last night. My friends were impressed."

"Thank you. Sapphire turned out to be a real gem."

"You were right to borrow her."

"Mrs. Dodge borrowed her." Flame looked at him carefully. "May I give you some advice?"

"If it's about proper comportment, then always. That's your primary job."

She was pretty sure that her primary job was s.e.x toy and that etiquette tutor was secondary, but she wasn't about to start an argument with a man who owned her and a cane and a whipping bench. "Mrs. Dodge has to phone Lady Hoffman and thank her for lending the slave. She should do it today between three and four o'clock. This is really important. It's easy to do but she has to do it right and she has to do it today. She can't wait to take care of it."

"Don't tell me. Go up to the house and tell her."

"Yes, sir."

"Make sure that she does it right."

"Yes, sir." And she would undoubtedly get kicked around the house for her efforts. Mrs. Dodge was fond of putting her boots to her.

After Dodge left, Flame decided that it was best to get the painful task over with right away.

She found Mrs. Dodge in the parlor.

"Mrs. Dodge?"

The woman stared at her in disgust.

"Mrs. Dodge, Mr. Dodge asked me to talk to you for a minute about Lady Hoffman."

The woman gestured to a chair.

Flame had never been invited to sit in her presence before. She didn't know what that meant.

"Lady Hoffman did you a kindness last night."

Mrs. Dodge sniffed. "Some kindness. Lending me a slave to ... entertain my husband and his cronies."

"I know. I always hated it when I had to do it, too. Always. But there's a protocol to follow. A fiction that must be maintained."

"Tell me."

"You have to phone Lady Hoffman this afternoon to thank her. It would be best to call between three and four. That's long enough after lunch that she'll be finished with her early afternoon ch.o.r.es but early enough that she won't be too caught up in preparing for any evening events. The favor that she did for you was considerable." Flame didn't mention that she had sent the most badly-scarred slave that she'd ever seen. To lend any slave to a woman with no t.i.tle was generous. "Your grat.i.tude can be effusive. Within reason. You have to be sincere. You can't sound like you might be sarcastic. Then you have to offer her a favor. Don't be specific. Just say that you would be happy to help her in any way that she might desire in the future. She'll know exactly what you mean." Flame couldn't meet Mrs. Dodge's eyes when she said that. She was instructing Mrs. Dodge to offer her for a night of entertainment at the Hoffman manor. Another night when she would be available for any kind of s.e.x that was desired by any man in the room.

Mrs. Dodge understood, too, and shook her head in disgust. Her foot twitched, but she didn't lash out at Flame. Yet.

Flame pressed on. "What's important about this call is that it is one of the few opportunities that you'll ever have to contact a t.i.tled lady on your initiative. It's a rare chance but you must not overplay it. Just thank her sincerely and offer to return the favor. Don't try to engage her in any further conversation. If she wants to talk about anything else, then let her speak with you and respond naturally. But that's not likely. After you've said what you have to say, that you'd be honored to do her any favor that she might wish at any future opportunity, the conversation will be over, but you must not hang up the phone. She must be the one to hang up. That's important. She has the rank so it's her prerogative to decide when the call is over. It will probably feel completely natural when she responds to your offer and then disconnects. The whole call is going to be easy and feel natural to both of you, but it must be done today. Waiting for a few days would be rude."

"I understand."

"Oh, and one other thing. It's possible that she won't be available to speak and that you'll be talking to her maid or secretary. Just leave a message that you would like to thank Lady Hoffman personally for the favor that she did for you and leave your name and number. She'll probably call back, but don't be offended if she doesn't. That would only mean that she has accepted your grat.i.tude already."

"I understand. I just thank her for sending the slave to help me."

"G.o.d, no. Don't say that the slave helped you. Any reference to the work that the slave did would be a serious breach of courtesy because it would remind her of the underlying truth of the situation. Just say that you want to thank her for her favor. That's all. You can say that you want to thank her so much or that you are deeply grateful. You have lots of lat.i.tude in how you describe your grat.i.tude. But don't refer to anything about what the slave did or didn't do. You aren't supposed to know anything about what she did or how she performed or how satisfactory she was."

Mrs. Dodge smiled wryly. "This call might not be so easy as you say."

"Sure it will. You'll do great. Just keep it simple."

"I do have one question," Mrs. Dodge said.

"Of course."

"Did Lady Hoffman's slave perform to everyone's satisfaction?"

Flame's blush burned so brightly on her face that she earned her name.

Mrs. Dodge laughed in delight. "You really are a lady inside. You foolish, foolish slave."

Flame was still blushing but she forced a smile and replied, "Sapphire's performance was delightful."

"Get out of here." There was no kindness in Mrs. Dodge's voice.

When Flame rose from the chair and turned to the door, Mrs. Dodge kicked her a.s.s so hard that she almost flew out the door.

But that evening, when Mrs. Dodge told Flame to go to the bathroom and wait for her dinner, she set a plate of fresh food on the floor instead of dumping sc.r.a.ps directly on the tiles.

And she didn't step in it before she left.

Flame was discovering that Mrs. Dodge had a subtle and sophisticated sense of humor.

And she had been learning Flame's lessons in comportment well.

She was no fishwife. If she were t.i.tled, she would fit well into proper society.

The Dodges hosted a half dozen formal dinners over the next three weeks. These were smaller than Flame's first entertainment only two couples were invited at a time. After each dinner, she was brought to the billiard room to service the three gentlemen by herself.

She had learned a lot from her duet with Sapphire and was clever enough to adapt it to a solo show that was less elaborate but just as theatrical.

She always began dressed as a lady, complete with proper makeup and hair. When she was led into the billiard room, she stripped slowly and provocatively, telling the men what it felt like to be transformed from a lord's wife to a slave. That was her special story and she told it well.

After she let her hair down, she would bend over a padded bench and offer "Gentleman's choice!" The two guests would use her; Dodge never bothered taking her himself. Most of the men penetrated her c.u.n.t rather than violating her a.s.shole.

Next, while she was still bent over, Dodge would exhort her to "give his honored guests her all!" To motivate her, he would administer a light paddling that stung and reddened her a.s.s.

The paddling was her idea but Dodge was happy to play along.

She would squirm and bounce theatrically, shrieking comically and playing the clown. The paddling hurt, but the men's laughter took a lot of the sting out of the strokes. She enjoyed pleasing them.

Later, after the men sat with drinks and conversed for a while, they would return to her. She would sink to her knees and service the men orally. Those were her finest moments. She had developed considerable expertise with her lips and tongue and could give a man more than a quarter hour of exquisite frustration as she teased him with almost enough stimulation to climax but not quite.

At close, she would be handcuffed and left on her knees, her head hanging in shame, her hair a curtain around her face, her inner thighs sticky with the juices of the strangers who had recently violated her. She was the picture of a degraded and humiliated slave a poignant contrast to the high and haughty lady that had entered the room at the beginning of the entertainment.

After the men had cleared the room, she would unlock herself with the key that was left on the toy shelf, clean the room, and retire to her kennel.

She had become an accomplished entertainer and she felt appreciated by the gentlemen. The morose knight, Sir Drake, was a guest more often than not, and even he lightened up and laughed at her antics when she was being paddled. He, more than any other guest, seemed to love the erotic frustration of her artfully-prolonged f.e.l.l.a.t.i.o.

Occasionally one of the guests would be mean-spirited. A couple of them violated her a.s.shole with fast, hard thrusts that were intended to cause pain and elicit tears. She was fastidious about keeping herself stretched and lubed and those men never caused damage. But she satisfied them by screaming and gasping and beating her fists ineffectually against the bench. And when a guest urged Dodge to strike hard with the paddle, urged him to make it really hurt, he always obliged and delivered a solid punishment to her a.s.s. She stopped the clowning and took the beating like a properly-chastised slave, whimpering and crying.

But she and the other guests understood that those just the ways that some gentlemen were best amused. None of them tried to crush her as subtly and as brutally as Grenfeld had.

She was given nothing that she couldn't handle with ease and elan.

Dodge always visited her the day after a formal dinner and debriefed her. He wanted her a.s.sessment of the t.i.tled men that she had entertained. These were knights and baronets that she had seldom met before so she could give little background. Sometimes she had a heard a bit of gossip about one or two, but nothing of consequence.

More important, he also expected her to listen carefully to the men's conversation when she was slumped on the floor after her paddling. Dodge encouraged the t.i.tled gentlemen to talk about their society. He loved to hear anecdotes and gossip.

During the debriefing the next day, Flame could give him a detailed a.n.a.lysis these anecdotes that illuminated each guest's att.i.tudes, position in society, and relationships with his peers.

On those days, Dodge did not use her for s.e.x. After he had seen her violated by other men, he preferred to wait for a second day. Even though he hadn't minded sharing Sapphire with everyone during that entertainment, he was a bit fastidious about Flame.

Flame was expressing her grat.i.tude to Barry, her kennelman, orally every few days. She had initiated that on the ruse that she needed to learn to give good head because she'd never done it before.

That had turned out to be more than a ruse.

She had thought that the mechanics of giving head would be obvious and it was at the basic level. But Barry had been giving her master cla.s.ses. What she learned from him, she had practiced with Dodge's guests until she was a virtuoso.

She had become intimately familiar with every part of the p.e.n.i.s. The tip of the head was different than the ridge and groove that separated the head from the shaft. The shaft was different at the root than it was near the head. The top of the shaft was different than the underside.

Each of these parts generated different sensations depending on whether they were kissed, licked, or sucked.

And she had developed a model of the inside of the p.e.n.i.s. Squeezing it with her fingers at the sides was different that squeezing it top to bottom or wrapping her fingers around it and compressing it. She had learned to judge the blood flows through the major veins and the pressure of the blood inside that make it erect.

More important, she had enough experience with enough different c.o.c.ks to know how they varied in size and shape from man to man and to know how different men responded to each of the different sensations that she could generate.

She could spend ten minutes giving a man one different sensation after another without repeating herself, and then she could move on to a second man and give him a completely different range of experiences that were tailored specifically for his size and shape.

She didn't especially enjoy having a man's c.o.c.k shoved in her mouth, but she loved being able to astound the man with her skill. When she was on her knees, gentlemen were her puppets and their p.e.n.i.ses contained all the strings that she could pull to make them dance to her tune.

s.e.x was the only power that a slave had so she wanted to learn to exploit it to the utmost.

After a dozen dinner parties, which required that she give head to more than two dozen men, she realized that she had only begun to exploit her s.e.xuality.

After relieving Barry of a heavy load she suspected that he sometimes saved himself for her when he knew that she would soon be going down on him she swallowed and then said, "I was thinking."

"Oh, oh," he said. "I hate it when a slave starts thinking because it's only a matter of time until I'll be putting antiseptic cream on another set of cane lines. I recommend that you stop thinking right now and don't start again."

"Don't worry. These thoughts aren't going to get me caned." Easy to say, but her stomach clenched at the thought of the heavy black cane that was hanging on the wall. She never wanted to feel that on her flesh. "You've taught me to give expert b.l.o.w. .j.o.bs."

"You're a brilliant pupil." He grinned. "It was my pleasure. Literally."

"Thanks. Anyway, I was thinking that I probably need to learn just as much about regular s.e.x as the oral variety. I pretty much let a man stick his c.o.c.k into my c.u.n.t and bang away. My reflex is to push back in the same rhythm until he comes. But there's got to be a lot more that I can learn about that, too. Just as much as you've taught me about giving head."

"Oh, no! I told you what happens if I penetrate you below the waist. I'm not going down there for anything. Ever." He looked upset. On the cusp of anger. "I told you that you were never to tempt me with that."

He poked and prodded her s.e.xual organs in his daily health checks, but he always wore latex gloves like any medical professional. He was adamant about never touching her below the waist with bare skin. He valued his own s.e.xual organs too much.

"I'm not offering anything to you," she said. "Don't worry. I'll beat you away with every ounce of my strength if you ever try to have s.e.x with me. You couldn't get it into me even if you wanted to."

"Thanks."

"I just want to know if there's anything that I can do to be a better ..." She couldn't say lover because there was no love in what owners did to slaves.

"s.e.x partner." He filled in the blank for her.

She didn't think that what she experienced daily was a partnership, either, but she nodded because he had the idea.

"I don't know," he said. "I'll look into it."

When he didn't mention anything for a few days, she thought that he had forgotten about her request, but one morning, after her physical, he said, "I asked a few people about your problem."

"Problem?"

"How you can make your c.u.n.t perform better."

"Oh, yeah."

"Sometimes slaves try to make their c.u.n.ts physically stronger. Your v.a.g.i.n.a is a tube of muscles. You can exercise them to strengthen them. If your c.u.n.t is more fit then it will stand up to the requirements of your duties better. More germane to your question, though, is that you can use that strength to squeeze a c.o.c.k when it's inside you. I heard that some slaves have developed enough strength and control to ma.s.sage a c.o.c.k to o.r.g.a.s.m."

"Men always have an o.r.g.a.s.m when they f.u.c.k me."

"Not this way. Imagine that you lie on your back and a man penetrates you and neither one of you moves. You do nothing but keep squeezing him with your c.u.n.t until he's so excited that he comes. No hands. No thrusting. Nothing but an internal ma.s.sage. Or he might lie on his back and let you mount him and give him the same treat."

"You think that's possible?"