‘I mean, the corridors,’ he amended. ‘Or on the stairs. This room is the only place where explicit sex acts are forbidden.’
‘I thought what that lad was doing was fairly explicit.’
‘Only if his dom had unbuttoned. That would have been different.’
‘And … what you’re doing to me now?’
I gasped. Joss was stroking up and down the outer lips of my pussy.
‘As long as nobody can see … anything goes,’ he said, biting my earlobe.
I tried to look demure, which was difficult, especially when my gaze landed on three buxom women engaged in a group hug that involved very smoochy, very tonguey kisses and a lot of hands under skirts.
The champagne was doing its work of knocking down the walls of inhibition very nicely.
‘Have you ever kissed a girl?’ Joss asked me, still moving that mesmeric fingertip up and down and around.
‘Only for a laugh,’ I managed to reply. ‘As a teenager. Before I met you. Oh, God, Joss.’
He had crept inwards, and was mere sticky millimetres away from my clit.
‘I’d like to order you to do it tonight. I’d like to watch your little hot mouth being kissed and tongued by a dominatrix. I’d like to watch her lift your skirts and press her breasts into yours and make you suck her nipples while she fingered you.’
‘Unh.’ I couldn’t say much more. I was streaming wet and my shameless clit was having a party on Joss’s finger.
‘You little horndog, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’d like to feel her fingers up inside you. You’d like to get on your knees for her and lick her while she pulled your hair and called you every name under the sun. Perhaps I could join in … perhaps I could spank you while you were licking her. Make sure you did the job properly. Then perhaps you could suck me while she had you with a strap-on … Oh, Lucy, Lucy, Lucy. Dear me.’
For I had come, twisting and moaning on his lap, my eyes shut against the awful thought that people might be watching. Surely they would guess from my burning cheeks, my open mouth, my sudden slackness of posture.
Too late.
He laughed into my hair, his breath heating my ear.
‘Bad girl,’ he taunted, tapping my clit with a disapproving fingertip. ‘Did you ask permission? No, you didn’t. I can’t sit here watching any more. Come on. I’m taking you to be spanked.’
I still couldn’t form words, so no protest fell from my lips. I followed him mutely as he pulled me by the wrist through the crowds. A couple of knowing smiles met my eye, but I felt emboldened by my mask to ignore them. Could they smell me as I passed through? They probably could.
All the way to the stairs, I was too preoccupied by the enormity of what I had just done – let myself be fingered to orgasm in a packed ballroom – to think of what was to come.
We went down into a torchlit corridor, weaving our way through bodies in all states of undress and congress. One couple were at it, hammer and tongs, on the bottom two steps. The night was young, I thought with a twinge of judgement. Shouldn’t they be pacing themselves?
We turned into an open doorway, the second of a long line, and joined the end of a queue that seemed to have formed.
‘What’s this? Santa’s Grotto?’ I whispered, but Joss simply shook his head, shushed me, and pointed to the goings-on at the other end of the room.
A woman was strapped over a kind of folding leather chair thing, her bare bottom high in the air while the costume skirts were bunched up at the side of her hips. I couldn’t see her face, just her bum and the backs of her legs.
On one side of her stood a man kitted out like a mediaeval executioner, all in black with a black leather mask over his head. On the other, one of the suited and booted Roissy-styled men.
‘What do you choose?’ asked the executioner.
‘She needs the cane,’ said the dom.
There was applause and some whistling from the queue, and from a separate group who stood to one side, intending only to watch.
Wait. If they were the watchers, then we were the punters? I was queuing up to get spanked! As if a public spanking wasn’t humiliating enough, I had to stand in a queue for it. The thought reduced me to a quivering mess of embarrassment. But it was also a huge turn-on. I had to wait here, meekly and humbly, until it was my turn to get what was coming to me. And everyone could see me here. They would know at a glance that it wasn’t Joss who was going to get bent over and dealt with.
‘Joss,’ I whispered, plucking at his shirt sleeve.