by Emily Tilton
It had to do that, because Herrier liked the chef so much he had installed the highest current level of surveillance countermeasures at his own expense. Other billionaires, whether they wanted to conduct sensitive financial transactions (drugs, mostly) or wished to dominate young women just as Herrier did, appreciated the gesture, secure in the knowledge that they had enough dirt on the leader of the Groupe to take him down with them, should it turn out that Herrier had installed his own intelligence gathering devices.
On the other hand, the restaurant had given governmental intelligence agencies paroxysms of rage for the three months since Herrier had placed the focused EMP barrier on every entrance and every utility duct leading to the dining room. Anything possessing an active electronic circuit found itself instantly disabled, and its presence registered for Herrier’s tech expert to come and claim it. If the chatter were to be believed, Israeli intelligence had lost tens of millions of dollars of sensors. Various Gulf States, in a desperate effort to stave off the end of their oil wealth, had donated, at a guess, a billion among them.
The solution, designed originally for corporate espionage in Silicon Valley, where Confidelia and Selecta had to deal with Relicorp’s continual nipping at their heels, lay in turning everything on the sensor drone off when it had reached the precise point in the air where the breeze from the opening and closing door would waft it into the restaurant. At that point, thanks to a microscopic chemical timer, it came back to electronic life and could go about its business.
Maintenance, of course, was functionally impossible: the sensor drone had two hours at most of activity. But it could transmit a signal that looked like noise from an electronic refrigerator to a boosting station a block away, and, tonight, Jean, Cynthia, and David could watch Barbara’s face reflect all the conflicted submissive need Herrier had awakened in her.
They could also track the fluctuating tides of heat in her body, thanks to the infrared capability of the camera. It didn’t give anywhere near as accurate a picture of a girl’s arousal as a perineal sensor, installed between Barbara’s vagina and anus, would have done, but an Ostia agent under cover couldn’t have one of those. Though the Institute’s proprietary design was nearly undetectable to the naked human eye, recent developments in counterintelligence technology had given experts the ability to find the sensor even when deactivated.
The number seven, in the upper right corner of the screen in the control room where the three watched the events in the restaurant, therefore had a question mark after it. The arousal assessment algorithm thought, based on Barbara’s facial expression and the temperature in various parts of her body, that she had reached level seven of ten, in terms of her submissive sexual need.
“What?” Barbara said, shuddering visibly and looking down at her hands on the green tablecloth, as if trying to will them to stop shaking.
“I think you heard me, girl,” Herrier said, his purring voice full of a dominant’s contentment in having a beautiful young woman exactly where he wants her: under his command and with a threat of punishment in the air. “Come now, I believe you do some work for a modeling agency that specializes in such things.”
Barbara looked up sharply at the billionaire. Jean had schooled her in how to handle this part, and he found himself nodding at the big screen on the wall, now, as if to encourage his nupta to deliver her line correctly.
“That’s... that’s kind of for show?”
“Perfect,” Cynthia murmured.
“And the...” Herrier paused, for effect, clearly wanting Barbara to think he meant to be delicate with regard to the delicate matter of Ostia’s two-sided cover as escort service in the guise of modeling agency. Then he delivered the verbal cut with coarse brutality. “...fucking, for money? How does your boyfriend like that?”
Barbara blushed deeply, the screen showing the feed from the infrared sensor displaying flaming blobs in her cheeks.
“He fell for it,” David said with satisfaction. They had set up Barbara’s afternoon visits to the Ostia Agency to look as if she might be doing photo shoots or she might be servicing clients sexually. Her visits from Jean, as her boyfriend, might or might not involve sex.
Herrier had a thing for innocents: he had in fact deflowered Cynthia herself when the Guard had sold her to him as an Institute concubine. He got aroused even more, though, when the innocent in question had something that besmirched her modesty: he had bought Cynthia because she had considered herself a hipster and immune to such things as traditional male-led sex.
Now, the question of Barbara Edwards’ experience or lack thereof, and its possible conflict with her submissive needs clearly occupied Herrier’s mind. Barbara only needed to give the kind of response that would keep him intrigued by the challenge he had sensed in her—or perhaps that her strappy top, with its tiny hint of bondage, had conveyed.
“Th-that’s...” she stammered. “I mean... I don’t. And... well, my boyfriend...” Barbara let her voice trail off. Herrier allowed the silence to stretch on, clearly sure he had the upper hand, and Barbara would reveal her sexual secrets now, with the result that his dominance over her would grow. The girl’s apparent confusion had whetted his appetite, Jean knew from the acquisitive glint in the billionaire’s eyes.
Barbara looked down at her hands again, the heat coming and going now in her cheeks. “He doesn’t know. About the... modeling.”
Now Herrier moved in for the kill. “Do you fuck your boyfriend, Barbara Edwards?” he asked casually.
Jean knew precisely what the tycoon wanted to see in the face of this American eighteen-year-old in whom he had taken such a strong erotic interest. Herrier’s piercing blue eyes sought the sign that in the depth of her heart and the aching of her clit, Barbara Edwards knew that for her the idea of a girl fucking a man could never seem right.
In her mind, Jean had told her, she would have to return to the moment before he, her leo, had introduced her to the truth of the matter—for her, at least, and for him, and for every Guardsman and every Ostia girl... that girls didn’t fuck. Girls got fucked.
As he had told her, Jean could see, Barbara found the mental journey back to virginity shockingly easy. So few of the powerful understood this crucial mechanism, which had been known to the Guard and their Ostia concubines long before their partnership with the Institute had provided the hard data to demonstrate its operation.
Herrier provided no exception: in his body language, even via the low-res image from the tiny camera in the restaurant, Jean could read the man’s confidence that Barbara’s wide-eyed, open-mouthed, red-faced reaction to his boorish, dirty question represented her authentic, modest astonishment and her helpless arousal at having a real man, a dominant man, begin to take her young sexuality so brutally in hand.
“You...” she started, staring at him, the crease in her forehead getting deeper by the second.
David said from beside Jean, “She’s not acting. Well done, Jean.”
Barbara looked down. No, Jean thought with a twinge of alpha rage, she’s not acting. For her, right now, Herrier is the first man who’s ever mastered her properly.
She had rebelled when Jean had told her she had to think herself to that point, if her cover were going to hold. She had told him she didn’t want even to imagine that another man could own her, body and soul, the way Jean did.
“Listen to me,” Herrier said now, putting his hand out to hold the back of Barbara’s head, fingers twining in her golden hair at the base of her skull. The Frenchman didn’t turn her head toward him—yet. The idea that he could, that he would, flashed in Barbara’s eyes, though. Herrier leaned close to speak in her ear, and the microphone on the sensor array didn’t catch the first few words he spoke, though the heat in Barbara’s face blossomed. Then the gain adjusted automatically, and on the now-slightly-scratchy but still distinct audio feed they heard, “...is, you little whore.”
Instantly the analytic algorithms supplied captions on the screen, question marks denoting w
ords the software had reconstructed, and a percentage at the end showing overall confidence: ?I ?know ?how ?wet ?your ?cunt is, you little whore (97%).
Barbara trembled all over. In the upper right of the main screen, the ?7 became ?8 and then ?9. Now Herrier did turn her face toward his, his eyes searching hers and the dominant smile on his face as little whimpers came from the girl’s lovely mouth.
“I’ve told you I know what you need, my dear,” he said. “Don’t make me whip you. Take off your panties and put them on the table.”
Barbara twisted her head a little, her eyes searching the tiny dining room, as if to see whether the waiter and the sommelier were watching. She bit her lip when she saw that, yes, of course they had seen Herrier move closer, had seen him take her literally in hand with his grip on her head; as Barbara’s eyes found the two servers, they discreetly but obviously looked down to their unnecessary tasks of polishing a fork and reading a wine label.
A little cry emerged from her chest, as if the heaving of her pert breasts in the innocent-looking but still strikingly sexy top had produced it without her even being aware of the noise. It brought Herrier’s attention to those lovely little round morsels, just as it brought Jean’s, and the magnate took his left hand from the table where it had rested and began to fondle Barbara’s enticingly bra-less bosom.
“Oh, please,” she whispered, sending her eyes toward the wait-staff again and finding the same quickly averted eyes that told her they understood exactly what was happening in their dining room and wouldn’t mind seeing the young American girl bent over the table for a whipping.
Another flare of alpha rage went through Jean, his irrational lizard brain resisting at all cost the rational control under which he tried to keep it. I told her to imagine herself that way, as the needy girlfriend of a young research fellow who couldn’t fully awaken her submissive passion, he told his atavistic, jealous instinct. She’s fulfilling her mission beautifully.
Cynthia, as if sensing his conflict, reached over to squeeze Jean’s hand.
“You trained her so much better than we could have hoped, even,” she said quietly.
On the screen in front of them, Barbara’s crumpled face had turned back to Herrier.
“Okay,” she said in a whisper. She started to rise. “I’ll... I’ll go to the bathroom, and...”
“No, Barbara,” Herrier said, pulling her back down firmly though not at all violently. “You will take them off here, at the table.”
She looked down at her hands again, still on the table where she had tried to use them to help herself rise. Jean thought he could see her fingers twitch there as the number in the upper right went to ?10.
“Enough,” Herrier said, as if he had become bored and impatient. “Garcon,” he called to the waiter, and then, in French, “tell my man outside to bring the strap from the car. You will hold—”
Barbara cried out, and her visibly shaking hands disappeared under the table.
“I am sorry, my dear,” Herrier said, obviously savoring his triumph, “but I am afraid I must whip you anyway, for this senseless hesitation. I think I shall do it at home, though—later tonight.” He gestured to the waiter not to go for the strap, and returned his attention to Barbara, who had frozen at the tycoon’s latest statement of his intent to claim her as his well-disciplined bed girl. “Go ahead,” he said, a bit of annoyance in his voice. “The panties. Now—or your first punishment here.”
Cynthia caught her breath, then, for a flicker of hesitation crossed Barbara’s face at the word first. Jean’s heart rose to his throat, but at the same time the tribute her look paid him melted his alpha rage. She had thought of him, the leo knew beyond doubt.
Then her mind and her submissive imagination returned to the moment at hand. She whimpered, and her hands, invisible beneath the table worked under her skirt, and the table moved, water sloshing a little, as she awkwardly drew the lacy white thong off to put it in front of Herrier. The infrared camera showed a blaze in her face as the tycoon picked up the tiny piece of fabric and brought it to his nose.
“Lovely,” he said, putting the panties in his breast pocket. “You won’t be needing these for a while, Barbara. I would like to show you my chateau, now, and after that I shall whip you in my bedroom before I enjoy your tight little cunt for the first time, and then your mouth and your young anus. Or perhaps I shall have your mouth first—I shall decide later.”
Jean couldn’t see Barbara’s eyes, for she had bowed her head so that her flaxen hair surrounded her pink face. He didn’t need the algorithms’ advanced analysis to see the way her hips jerked on the banquette as she heard these promises, though.
“Allons-y,” Herrier said to the waiter. “Have them pull the car up, please.” He turned back to Barbara. “Say, oui, seigneur, my dear. Then we may depart, and you will receive what you need and deserve.”
“Oui, seigneur,” Barbara whispered.
Chapter Nine
The Granbys had their new friends Maia North and Gordon Ernkat over for dinner the night before they left for Paris. Jenny had met Maia in Rome, but Gordon hadn’t been present, then. He and Henry got along very well, which didn’t happen very often, though Henry certainly could put on a good show of liking every man he met at the country club—or in town when they ran into acquaintances at the opera. He had confided in Jenny, though, even before their marriage, that he preferred the company of very few men indeed to her own, whether her clothes happened to be on or off.
That had made Jenny blush, of course, because it reminded her of the special rights her husband asserted over her body—rights she felt certain a young wife like Hannah Fong didn’t have to acknowledge despite her promiscuity. It made her feel very proud, too, however: Hannah Fong didn’t seem to have the same level of intimacy with her husband that Jenny had with Henry.
Hannah complained constantly in the women’s locker room about how she had to clean up after John Fong despite their maid working three days a week. Jenny couldn’t imagine speaking like that about Henry, even if she did have to put his dishes in the dishwasher, or throw away an empty bag of chips he had left in his den after watching a football game—and vacuum up the nacho cheese powder. Those little chores felt like a privilege to Jenny, and sometimes she found herself wondering if she should do them naked, in case Henry came in and wanted to reward her for doing them correctly—or even to punish her for doing them wrong.
Seeing the way Maia North, a brilliant, stunningly successful tech-startup CEO, looked at her deep-chested, ultra-sexy partner Gordon made Jenny wonder whether Maia might also think about vacuuming naked, and being punished for faults in her cleaning duties. In Rome, Jenny had seen—she still preferred to think of it as having been made to see—other girls serving the men who took care of them in such embarrassing, even degrading ways.
Maia had seen Jenny herself made to serve Henry with her skirt up and her panties down, her husband’s hardness thrusting urgently into her bare, wet pussy. Jenny hadn’t seen Maia doing anything like that, but rather wearing a gorgeous dress and apparently helping to direct the proceedings. Those proceedings had had something to do with the Institute for which Max worked, and on whose authority he taken Jenny to his apartment to train her as Henry’s bed girl and wife.
Maia wore a close-fitting necklace around her neck, made of black leather. Jenny couldn’t help the urge to call the choker, which she remembered the woman had also worn in Rome, a collar, though really it only suggested that idea. When Gordon put his hand on the back of Maia’s neck and fingered the choker casually, during dinner, Jenny shivered.
That same moment she thought she understood why Henry liked Gordon, beyond their obviously compatible high-level intellects and interest in technology. The San Francisco financier looked back at his partner Maia North the same way Henry looked at Jenny, and Jenny felt sure that the choker meant what her wanton imagination told her it did: Maia had to submit, bodily, to Gordon the same way Jenny did to her own handsome, square-j
awed husband.
And she likes it, Jenny thought, the heat spreading across her face so distractingly that she had to get up and start clearing the table.
“Jenny, sweetheart,” Henry said, just as she had put the plates in the sink, “come back and sit down, please.”
His voice had a note of command in it—a familiar note, but one that he had never used in front of others before—that made Jenny’s blush return in full force. She caught the inside of her lower lip between her teeth and chewed on it, feeling her forehead furrow, as she obeyed her husband and came back to sit down, looking at the salad bowl that she hadn’t been allowed to clear.
To her astonishment, Maia, who sat diagonally across the table from Jenny, reached out to take the younger woman’s hand. Maia was thirty, or maybe a little older, and when Jenny’s eyes rose to meet her gaze across the remnants of dinner she saw an understanding that warmed her heart even as it also warmed her face a bit more, too. Clearly, this glamorous tech CEO understood very well what it meant to be the special kind of wife Jenny Granby had become.
“Jenny,” Henry said. “I want you to listen carefully to what Maia and Gordon have to say. We’re going to France partly to do them an important favor, and some of the responsibility for taking care of that favor is going to fall on you. I don’t want you to be prudish about what you’re going to hear, do you understand? What Maia says will probably embarrass you, but I’m sure you don’t want to have to take a trip to the guest room tonight.”
“The guest room?” Maia asked, clearly seeing the even brighter shade of pink Henry’s words had turned Jenny’s face. Maia didn’t let go of Jenny’s hand, but rather gave it a reassuring little squeeze.
“Jenny gets the belt over the bed in the guest room when she’s naughty,” Henry said, so greatly to Jenny’s humiliation that she couldn’t suppress a little cry of protest, or a tear in her right eye. She darted an anguished glance at Henry, but then bowed her head toward the table, unable to look at anything but her napkin.
