Read Online Under a Stern Reign by Raymond Wilde - Free Book Online

her facedown across the desk instead.
    â€˜No!’ Genevieve managed to shriek, shaking with chagrin, her cheeks aflame. Tears welled in her eyes and she struggled to raise herself, but a sharp push from the count pressed her back down on the desktop, and his hand remained between her shoulders, pinning her to the polished surface.
    â€˜Hold her hands,’ Count de Tranville ordered Elise, and she obediently grasped Genevieve’s wrists and pulled them to the desk’s edge. Speechlessly Genevieve searched her friend’s eyes for some empathy, and was shocked to find none. Her buttocks, exposed to the count, suddenly felt chilly and unbearably vulnerable. What was he doing behind her...?
    The vicious leather crop whistled through the air and sank into Genevieve’s buttocks, making her howl as it scorched a path across them and made her squirm frantically against the hands holding her. She had never been punished so severely in her young life before, but the pain in her bottom, far from being unbearable, was fanning the delicious heat already simmering there.
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Chapter Four
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    When Elise told Genevieve that Rodolfo was a man who could not be content with just one woman, she could hardly have been more right, and he would have been the first to confess this. Nature had bestowed Rodolfo with gifts that many men would envy. He was rich, handsome, and possessed an athletic frame. He was also very well endowed.
    But, while Rodolfo was a man to delight many a woman in bed, he had also grown difficult to satisfy. He had enjoyed sleeping with so many in Portugal, Spain and France, that at the age of twenty-five an ennui began to affect him. So to rectify this he had taken to experimenting with other practices.
    Wild parties in Paris took his fancy for a while, but he eventually grew tired of them. And while from time to time even men offered themselves to his curiosity, he never really felt much interest in such a departure. So currently he found contentment sleeping with a number of pretty women at the same time, usually in the better Parisian brothels.
    It was for these reasons that when Rodolfo awoke in his apartment in Paris, naked beneath his goose feather quilt, he was not startled to feel the warmth and weight of two soft bodies moulding against him. He threw back the quilt and stared at the two girls sprawled beside him, and it took a moment to recall their names - Claudine and Juliette, that was it.
    Both were blonde, and whilst Claudine was naked Juliette slept in her black corset. Claudine, the slighter of the two, rested her head on his stomach, while Juliette nestled in the crook of his arm.
    Claudine and Juliette, he mused... the young and destitute former mistresses of an executed aristocrat. He had found them in a Paris brothel, and taken by the beauty of the fallen pair, so totally at odds with the shabby den in which they resided, he took them home with him.
    It was strange how similar the two were. They had almost the same shade of blonde hair; their skin had a similar olive hue, and there was not that much difference in their shape or size.
    It was lucky for them that he found them only recently after they started working in the seedy brothel, before the delicacy of their beauty had been completely erased by their labours among the grubby hands and lusty loins of countless miserly commoners.
    What a state France was in, he contemplated, and then his thoughts drifted to his visit to the Count de Tranville.
    At first deep reluctance had filled him when he received his father’s instruction to assist the count in fleeing the country. But the sight of the man’s two beautiful charges quickly changed his mind. What was there to keep him in Paris, anyway?
    And what a treat Elise had turned out to be! And Genevieve... he was sure he had never seen such a beautiful girl before. Thoughts of the two made him stir, and he looked at the two sleeping girls beside him. What was he to do