Kate and Julia: Slave Girls of the Raj Read Online Free

you hear?”
    “Y… yes, Master.” Again Julia could not drag her eyes from his uncompromising stare.
    “Come then.” Ignoring his scattered clothes, he strode bare-skinned out of the bathhouse.
    She rose quickly and hurried after him towards the zenana .

    *

    “Ooh, what are you doing to me?” Kate cried. She squirmed against the horribly confining leather straps on her body and felt the chafe of the thick leather collar Ross had buckled around her neck. It was chained to a wooden rail behind her. Her arms too were bound, straps at wrists and elbows holding them in a reversed praying position at her back and attached to the same rail as her neck. Cutting into her flesh above her breasts was another strap that ran under her armpits and secured her tightly to a second rail behind her.
    “I’m going to show you what Jefferson would have done if it had been him you had threatened to shoot,” Ross said as he finished buckling a strap around her left thigh. He had placed it very high, as he had the one on her right, with both of them biting into her skin and pulling apart more than just her legs.
    “Ooh, that’s awfully tight,” Kate groaned.
    “It needs to be. We don’t want you jerking around and injuring yourself.”
    Her belly flipped at the implication in his words. “Oh, don’t hurt me. I’m sorry. Really I am.”
    “You’re sorry now,” Ross said. “You weren’t when you pointed that pistol at me. There’s a lesson for you, little miss. Never aim a gun at a man unless you intend to use it, especially if that man is me.”
    “How do you know I wouldn’t have?” Kate asked, a flash of temper rising through her fear.
    His forbidding expression vanished in a grin. “I know. I reckon you would shoot if your life was threatened. You’re a brave little thing, after all. But even if the gun had been loaded, you wouldn’t have fired.”
    Frightened, resentful and very uncomfortable though she was, Kate somehow still managed to be pleased that he thought she was brave. He was right too. She had never intended to shoot him. The sight of his whip in his hand made her catch her breath as he reached to two brass handles on the frightening device to which he had bound her. It was made of wood, a rectangular frame within a frame, one resting solidly on the floor, the other fixed to it by a large brass pivot at either side. The ex-soldier turned the handles beside each pivot, and Kate’s heart leapt when the inner frame swung back and forth as it was unlocked from the outer one.
    Ross tilted it and she gave a startled cry as her body angled forwards. Her feet rested on the lower bar of the inner frame, strapped at ankles and knees as tightly as they were at her thighs. Kate felt some of her weight transfer from her legs to the strap above her breasts and a wooden bar that crossed the frame at her belly, in line with her hips. The collar around her neck pressed against her throat and she had to force her head back, increasing the strain on her pinioned arms and shoulders. It worsened as Ross tilted the frame further. He moved a hinged bar on it across her chest, two lengths of wood joined at each end by a big brass bolt topped by a large wing nut. They locked in place above and below her hanging breasts, and she flinched as his hands firmly pulled the twin rounds between the two bars.
    “Oh, no” Kate whimpered when he began tightening the wing nuts, squeezing her flesh tightly between the narrowing space separating the wooden lengths until she hissed in pain. Ross tilted the frame upright, easing the pressure on her neck and belly, and she was able to look down as he locked it in place with the handles.
    “No, please.” The bars were tight against her chest, the flesh of her breasts bulging grotesquely between them and their pale skin already mottled pink and beginning to darken. They hurt, and they looked horribly, frighteningly vulnerable. Their points had already become swollen and puffy.
    “You’ve