“Who knows? I didn’t know I loved it until someone hurt me the first time. After that I couldn’t get enough. Was I made? Peut-être? Then again, I didn’t know I loved Cabernet Sauvignon until I had my first glass, either. But the taste buds, they were already there....”

“I suppose it doesn’t matter how you got it. It’s here. Drink up.” At that she stroked him hard as she left four more parallel lines of blood on his back.

She removed her talons and sat them aside before stripping her victim completely naked. As she dragged his pants down his legs, she bit his upper thigh, lower thigh and calf hard enough to leave three black bruises. She couldn’t help herself—the man did have exquisite legs.

Now that she had his back bared and bleeding, she decided it might be time to give him some real pain. Of course, she’d broken the skin, which meant a few more precautions would be necessary. She opened a case that had a new deerskin flogger in it—never before used. Doing edge-play with a client meant more work for her during and after. Usually she charged through the nose for even a cut or two, but for him, well, he was a special case. Not that this was a freebie. To quote the boss: “No freebies. Ever.”

She stood behind him and examined her handiwork.

“You’re bleeding,” she said. “A lot.”

“Merci” was his sole response, the only one she expected, the only one she wanted.

“But they’re tiny little cuts. If I left them alone, they’d heal up in two days. Where’s the fun in that?”

She raised the flogger and brought it down hard onto his bleeding back. She struck again. And again. She struck high and hard, low and deep. She added welts to the cuts, bruises to the welts. The tips of the flogger tails smeared the blood and soon his entire back had turned a rusty red.

After a good—for her—half hour of flogging she dropped the deerskin and let him catch his breath.

“Have you ever safed out with anyone?” she asked as she came to stand at his side again. A few drops of semen had leaked from his cock and she caught them on her fingertip.

“Non, Maîtresse.”

“You like pain that much? Or is it pride?”

“You know the answer to that already. Why did you never safe out with him?”

“I did,” she corrected him. “But only once.”

“Why?”

“Because,” she said as she wrapped her hand around his erection again and squeezed to the point of pain, “he ordered me to marry him.”

“He must be a masochist, too,” he said through gritted teeth. The Mistress could only laugh.

“Oh, you’re gonna get it big-time for that.”

Big-time meant the cane. Not the rattan cane she used to leave the hand-sized bruises on a client’s ass or thighs. No, what she needed was the little cane—white plastic, long as a conductor’s baton. In fact, it had always reminded her of a baton; one she used to conduct a symphony of pain.