not.”
He laughed and released my hair as he sat up. “You think that was the first time I’ve fucked her? How do you think she got the job? I don’t hire anyone who doesn’t bend over and spread them in the interview.” He stood. “Well, women anyway. I don’t do men.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a pocketknife. My heart began to pound. Maybe he wasn’t going to rape me. Maybe he was just going to kill me. At the moment, I wasn’t sure which one to hope for.
“Shall we move this along?”
I realized now that he’d already taken off my shoes and thigh highs while I’d been unconscious. Easier to tie my ankles, I supposed. I would’ve wondered why he hadn’t just stripped me completely, but I already knew the answer. He wanted me to be awake when he cut off my clothes. He got off not only on the power, but on the fear and pain as well.
He ran his free hand up over my calf, then over my skirt and up to my blouse. I tried to jerk away when his hand reached my breast, but there wasn’t anywhere to go. He grabbed one, squeezing hard enough that I let out a hiss of pain, then did the same to the other.
“Do you have any idea the time and effort that goes in to training someone for what I have them do?” He lowered the knife and cut off the top button. “I’m not some pimp who grabs girls off the street and turns them out to any trick with ten bucks. I only cater to high-end clients with refined taste.”
“So you’re a high-class pimp?” It probably wasn’t a good idea to backtalk to someone with a knife just above your chest, but I couldn’t just lie here in silence. I may not have been able to move, but I could talk, and words had always been my go-to defense mechanism.
Howard scowled. Apparently he didn’t like my question. “My girls don’t just lie on their backs and take it. I groom them to learn how to read a man’s desires and respond accordingly. I do train some for specific purposes, ones whose masters want to humiliate them, I don’t degrade, leaving that pleasure to my client. Ones who are to be left intact, I don’t fuck. But most of my clients are looking for women who can and will do whatever they are told without complaint.”
The last button fell away and my blouse was hanging open, exposing my bra and a pale strip of skin down my stomach. Howard leaned down and put his knife through the thin cotton, easily ripping up one sleeve, then the other. He let the ruined shirt lie in pieces under me and moved down the bed.
“You saw firsthand some of that with Annie,” he said. He began to cut my skirt off. “I groomed her to please me, but in a pinch, she could do the same for my clients. Do you want to know the things I’ve done to her?”
He was trying to get a rise out of me, and I knew I shouldn’t respond, but I couldn’t just do nothing. I really didn’t want to hear what he’d done to his assistant. I shook my head, but it didn’t stop him, just like I’d known it wouldn’t.
“The first time I made her take off her clothes in public, she cried.” He pushed the two halves of my skirt away, leaving me in just my bra and panties. “I bent her over my knee and spanked her for it right there in that park.”
I squeezed my eyes closed, as if I could block out his words. Then I felt his hands on me, the cold metal of the knife against my skin, and had to open them. He wasn’t trying to cut me; it was only the flat of the blade. He was touching me though, running his hands over my legs and stomach, never touching anything covered by my underwear.
“She learned quickly.” He sounded almost proud. “I rarely had to punish her, and never as harshly as the first time. She’d refused to go down on me at a restaurant, even after I’d told her that she would be punished for saying no.”
His hands now moved to my breasts. I pressed my lips together as he touched me. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of a response. Not for this. I would