in the same clearing as the Rolls Royce. The thought had only made her wetter.
Julia had been spread-eagled against the side of the car for ten minutes before the chauffeur had re-appeared. He had said nothing as he had looped lengths of rope round each of Julia's wrists and each of her stocking-clad ankles. From time to time his gloved hand had touched her, abruptly and then gently: a smack and then a caress to her right buttock; a thrust and then an inquisitive circling within her outer labia.
Suddenly he had picked her up and laid her across the bonnet of the car. The smell of the engine had been momentarily overwhelming; she had felt its heat pushing against her stomach.
Her left wrist and left ankle had been tied to the car's massive headlamps; her right wrist and ankle were tied to the lower hinges of the front doors. She had been unable to make any purchase on the gleaming coachwork, but the ropes had been pulled tight and she was completely immobilised. Her thighs were pressed against one side of the engine housing, her ribs and stomach against the other. Her long dark hair almost reached the leafy ground. Her bottom, now the highest part of her body, was lifted clear of the bonnet. Julia was very uncomfortable.
When the chauffeur had started to whip her again, the blows had been a little harder, and much more concentrated. He had aimed all the strokes at a circular area containing Julia's anus, the lower and inner slopes of her buttocks, her vulva, and the insides of the tops of her thighs. Each searing point of her pain had been momentarily enough to drive from Julia's mind the discomfort of her situation: her bound limbs and her straining muscles. And when the chauffeur had started to masturbate her between each stroke of the crop, Julia had found herself unable to concentrate on any of the sensations that were pursuing each other round and round like a pack of demented hounds. The heat of the sun above and the car engine below; the opening out as a leather-clad finger brushed her clitoris; the breathtaking burst of fire as yet another whip-stroke landed on her hot flesh; the vertiginous sensation as she automatically tried to flail her legs but couldn't move them an inch; these and a dozen other thoughts had circled faster and faster in Julia's mind. She had heard something panting like an animal, and then realised it was her. The panting had changed into long, drawn-out sobs.
The whipping, the heat, the bondage, the shame, the finger was touching again, touching her just there -
And Julia had climaxed, suddenly, slumping against the black metal and heaving great ragged breaths. Her tears had dripped on to the forest floor just behind the car's massive white-walled tyres.
'Clear evidence of copious weeping,' the chauffeur had then said. 'What a pity my instructions explicitly forbid anything more.'
'A good job well done,' Julia had managed to say between sniffs and deep breaths and inexplicable laughter. 'Would you release me now, please?'
'Certainly, Madam. Welcome back to the Private House.'
And even as the chauffeur had been untying the ropes, Julia had known she had been right to return. Laid out before her was another country: a wild, unpredictable place, exotic and mysterious, and yet a landscape in which she felt completely at home.
After that, she enjoyed every minute. The Private House seemed unchanged since her last visit; she recognised some of the other staff. Her room had oak wainscotting and furnishings of brown and gold fabrics; from the east-facing window she saw an avenue of chestnuts that disappeared into a belt of woodland beyond which, she realised, was hidden the health club that had been for her, as for so many others, the first experience of the Private House. At the edge of the panorama, not far from her window, she could see just the easternmost tower of the old castle, ivy-covered and mysterious, ominous and yet picturesque. Her little room already felt like home, and she was so
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