frigid 'How d'you do's'. The Sheik told me afterwards he found us hilarious. 'Your last remark was correct, Miss Harding. This beloved child is in constant need of the lash,' he said with grave courtesy. 'Perhaps you would assuage her hunger?' He took the whip from the wall and offered it to the girl who had wandered into my punishment room by accident. Yolanda looked from one to the other of us, gauging the mood. She accepted the whip. Carefully, and with cruel skill, she lashed my back and bottom five times. I almost swooned with joy. Azzam nodded approval.
'You have done this before, Miss Harding?'
'No, but I've always wanted to.'
'You are unusually honest, my dear.'
'Daddy always told me I could be, with you.' Azzam sighed. 'He was a fine man and my friend. It has pleased me that you should visit my house.' His eyes twinkled. 'I think it matters not that you have stumbled on this domestic scene.'
'It was inexcusable. I should not have wandered-' My owner waved a forgiving hand and relieved her of the whip. 'It is perhaps the will of Allah. I sense between you that strange intangible for which man has no name. Is she not beautiful!'
'She is lovely beyond dreams,' Yolanda breathed. Two days later she purchased me and took me home to Castle Glynt. At the last moment I did not want to go. I fell to my knees before the Sheik who was my lord. I kissed his hand as though I could not let it go, wetting it with my tears.
'Azzam isn't all that rich,' My new Mistress explained to me on the plane that winged us home. 'My fifty thousand means something to him. I think he has some special need of it. If there's any oil in his kingdom no one seems to have found it.' She patted my nylon clad knee. 'I'll tell you this, you outrageous sexpot, if he'd been thirty years younger a couple of million wouldn't have been enough to pay your price. He loves you, I think he believed he was being kind…' I was terribly, terribly happy.
'But Azzam was kind, he liked you,' I protested.
'Azzam hasn't arrived yet, Phemie. It's a sort of an advance guard that's taken over Glynt. I think they're soldiers in civilian clothes, but Lotta's the boss.'
'Lotta! Here?'
'Is she ever! I owe these to her.' Yola ruefully traced a finger the length of some of her wounds, then rattled her chains. 'She's an absolute virago if you argue.' I remembered Lotta whipping my legs that first time.
'But the argument… how-?' My darling Mistress was instantly indignant, 'About six of them walked in and took over — just like that?'
'But what did they say?'
'Damn little. Some shocking gangsters were after you, and they'd been sent to intervene. They called in help. When I told them this was England and the police handled things like that, they produced the handcuffs. I'm sure that Lotta female enjoyed snapping them on behind my back. It was while I stood there tugging at the damn things on my wrists and not quite believing any of it that they told me they were staying and that I must brief the servants and have them carry on normally. I had to make a plausible story so I could be absent a day or two here and there without raised eyebrows. Lotta was the chatelaine in my absence.'
'Absence'!' Yola sardonically shook her fettered hands at me. 'I'm not exactly present right now, am I!'
'And you said no.'
'Of course! I was outraged. That's when they whipped me. After they'd whipped me quite awhile it didn't seem quite so preposterous and I said yes.' My heart went out to my darling. How well I knew! 'But why the dungeon?' I asked, puzzled. She shrugged. 'They don't trust me. Suppose you can't blame 'em. I haven't been very polite.' She gave a brief giggle. 'Phone calls have been a bit of a poser for 'em. With those they wanted me to take — those referring to you, Lotta dashes down, unlocks my waist band and carries me to the nearest phone. She told me what to say. Afterwards she carries me back and locks me to the wall again. I suppose it is a neat disposal of a nagging female.'
'They don't need all those chains on you.' My Mistress gave me a wry grin. 'I put this many on you often enough. It's been a marvellous opportunity for me to gauge their effect. It's quite potent, isn't it?'
'Keeps a slave girl in her place and lets her know what she is.'
'Sure. That is actually the way it works on a girl. It's having that effect on me, and I didn't have a predilection the way you did.'
'But, darling, you can't possibly be a slave girl, you're not the type, and you don't want-' Yola gazed at me solemnly. 'A few days ago that's what I'd have said myself. But now I'm not sure. I just don't know!'
'There's a difference between a slave girl and just a prisoner. You're a prisoner.' Yolanda looked at me with love. 'You're being sweet, Phemie. But look at the two of us. We're both locked in and chained, aren't we. What's the difference?' There wasn't any. In a second frenzy of wanting we fought our chains to appease our hunger with avid lips upon the hot wet sex. At night we slept peacefully entwined. The days and nights of our imprisonment slipped by. Each morning I was taken, by a solicitous Lotta, and bathed and perfumed and loved. I could tell she was genuinely pleased to possess me again. To her I would always be a slave girl, our status was normal. She refused to change my handcuffs. She had shrewdly divined their presence on my wrists. It amused her to keep them there. I did not argue. I'd asked for them and I'd damn well got them! I thought nostalgically of James clicking them on me. It seemed a million years away. Whilst Lotta treated me with affection, she had nothing but an indignant scorn for my Mistress. Yola had offended some deeply ingrained sense of what the Arab woman considered proper. Quite probably Lotta saw all Western females as slaves and had no patience with one of them who refused the appellation. She flatly refused my plea that Yola enjoy the same privileges as myself. No bath! No removal of a single shackle! She was adamant. I dared not push too hard for fear I'd earn us both a whipping to keep us quiet. With my wrists handcuffed behind my back I could perform no service for Yola that she could not manage herself. Apart from the indignity of their weight and intent, her chains actually gave her more scope for the use of her hands than my handcuffs granted me. Despite our metal bonds we gloried in a veritable orgy of making love. On the day when, after I had been bathed, I was taken to Yola's bedroom and bedecked in the flimsy exquisiteness I remembered so well, I knew what to expect. Lotta smiled but would not tell. My handcuffs stayed. I pleaded for their removal, but was laughed at. They had not impeded the trifles which now adorned my breasts and loins. Lotta saw them as appropriate to the other bangles she placed upon my person. I was propelled into the huge drawing room with something of a flourish. He was there! The same lined face that had no age, the same kind wise eyes that glowed with delight at the sight of me. With a small cry of pure love I sank to my knees at his feet and sought his hand. The cuffs prevented me clasping it, but he pressed it to my lips and held it firm while I kissed it again and yet again… I cannot tell you the quality or name of the affection I bore the Sheik Inman Azzam but it was deep and it was without lust.
'My child, my dear child!' He raised me to my feet and kissed me softly on my forehead. 'Let me look at you.' He held me at arm's length for a long time. 'You are more beautiful than ever, a dream of loveliness.' He turned me gently around. 'Come, come! You have been a bad girl?' He fingered my handcuffs. I confessed to my erotic folly.
'And you wish to wear them still?'
'If it please my lord.'
'It pleases me. You are a treasure of delight.'
'Master, there is Yolanda, Miss Harding. She is chained in a dungeon.' His eyes lit with humour. 'It appears our esteemed Miss Harding had offended my trusted Lotta.'
'It is a difference of cultures, lord, a misunderstanding.'
'Ah yes. A difference you overcame most readily as I recall.'
'Not before you had me whipped, lord.'
'Even so, your adjustment amazed me.'
'I am a slave girl, Master. It was born in me. Your lash explained everything I had not known,'
'Are you certain your adored Miss Harding cannot find grace by the same path?' I must have looked startled. Azzam laughed at my dismay. 'Come, come, you exquisite creature! Stand out before me while I sit and feast my eyes and tell why I am here.' I did as bidden. I arranged my femaleness to its best advantage. I wanted most ardently to please this man who had once owned me.
'Money, child. Always money! In that time when my delightful guest: the daughter of an old friend, stumbled
