by Maren Smith
Some of the stiffness melted from her shoulders. “Sandy. Nice to meet you.”
“You mean Ginger,” Eric corrected even as Reeve instinctively checked their surroundings. The room was even more empty now than before. The maids had cleared the buffet and guests were leaving to find more interesting amusement. Fortunately, no one remained close enough to overhear her slip up.
Except it wasn’t a slip-up, and Sandy wasted no time clarifying that. “No, I mean Sandy. Ginger was the stupid character off that old TV show, Gilligan’s Island. I hated her.”
“I thought Gilligan was the stupid one,” Eric said, looking at Reeve over the top of her head. Reeve was the only one left in the ballroom who could clearly hear what Eric was really asking: Is this bratting behavior?
Believing what he did, Reeve doubted it.
Because, Eric continued, eyebrows arching and a tickle of a smile pulling at his lips, if she doesn’t mean to be pushing my buttons, someone needs to tell her she’s pushing my buttons. Serious button pushing going on right here.
“No,” Sandy debated. “Gilligan had some form of mental retardation, and that wasn’t his fault. Ginger was downright stupid. And I could never tell if the writers thought she should be that way because she was a movie star, and movie stars are all brainless gits, or if it was because she was a woman for the same reason.”
“Or because she was a redhead,” Reeve suggested.
She gave him a withering frown. “Like I said. I hated her. She was stupid.”
“You should have changed your name at the orientation desk,” he informed her. “That was when you had the option.”
She shrugged. “Why do I have to change my name at all? Seems silly to me.”
“Anonymity is—”
“Key,” she said, finishing Reeve’s sentence for him. “Yeah, I read the brochure. I don’t want to change my name.”
“Everyone goes by another name, that’s the point of anonymity,” Eric chimed in, looking over her to Reeve again as if he couldn’t believe either one of them were taking the time to explain this.
Reeve couldn’t believe it either. Off the top of his head, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a non-roleplaying argument with any of his submissives and it wasn’t a precedence he had any interest in indulging. He cut the argument with the flat of his hand. “You may either decide on an alternative name right now, or we’re calling you Ginger.”
She blinked at him twice, then scoffed. “No.” It was the best ‘you can’t make me’ tone he’d ever been so very ready to prove wrong. “Look, if everyone else is going by a different name, then who’s to know or even care if you call me by my real one?”
“I’m not going to argue with you.” Reeve was more than a little astounded that he had to.
“Good.” She scoffed again. “It’s settled. I win.”
“Oh,” Eric said, half laughing and half insulted. “We have got to get her back to the room.”
At this rate, they weren’t going to make it half that far.
“So, how does this work?” Sandy asked, completely oblivious to the volumes of conversation passing in the looks Reeve was exchanging with Eric above her head. “I wouldn’t mind a tour. You know, see what’s here and where everything is.”
And there was the reporter again. She wasn’t trying to be subtle about it, either.
“There will be no tour,” Reeve said flatly, closing that argument before she could start it.
“No, there won’t,” Eric added. “In fact, the only place you’re going right now is straight up to our room.”
“You guys room together?” The look she shot them both changed ever so subtly.
Eric arched both eyebrows again, right before he threw back his head and laughed.
“No,” Reeve said dryly. “We do not. Nor do we bring Castle guests back to our private, separate apartments. We did, however, reserve a guest room for the three of us for the duration of your stay.”
Her mouth rounded. “Oh.”
“I’m going to paddle you,” Reeve promised. She deserved it for that comment alone.
“There’s nothing wrong with being gay.” She edged half a step away from him. “And stop looking at me that way. I don’t like that look. It does very weird things to my stomach.”
“It ought to do weird things to your backside,” Eric shot back. “That’s the part of you in the most danger right now.”
Her hand twitched, but she caught herself before she did anything so childish as tuck it back behind her. A poor defense, as well-spanked bottoms everywhere already knew, but Reeve recognized that twitch for what it was. Littles did that, but so did new submissives. She was pushing all the wrong buttons, but she was doing it out of ignorance. This was her first tumble down the rabbit hole, a fall she was only willing to take because of an ulterior motive, but already Reeve could see where this would end. He could see himself stripping her of her green princess dress, one set of untied laces at a time. He could also see her standing at the foot of one of the Castle’s infamous four-poster bondage beds in nothing but her shift—or hell, not even that—with that twitching little hand of hers tucking back behind her as she watched Reeve unbuckle his wide leather belt and pull it free of his pants loops.
And it absolutely would be Reeve who did that; Eric could use a belt when he had to, but he didn’t prefer it. Eric was a Daddy Dom at heart. He liked those ‘gentler’ methods—the scolding and guiding, lots of hugging and caressing, and when spankings were delivered, he liked over-the-knee with his open hand imparting the pain. It was more intimate that way.
Reeve was not a gentle Dom. He wasn’t a straight-up sadist, either. On the sliding scale of alpha malehood, with Daddy Doms at one end and Dungeon Masters the other, Reeve landed somewhere in the middle. He liked canes, crops, paddles and straps. He liked the head-game of making her fetch the implement he would then use on her. He liked the squirming, the trembling fingers and trepidatious glances that accompanied his making her take down her own underwear, baring herself for his pleasure and his punishment, and he could so easily see Sandy doing all of that for him. He could see her bending to lay her trembling hands on the foot of his bed, offering her ass for its first good old-fashioned whipping. And Reeve could see himself delivering it, because he wanted to be her first. He wanted to be the one she remembered from now until the end of her life, every time some stray thought sparked this memory, leaving her to wonder time and again what unfathomable impulse had made her obey instead of running for the nearest exit.
“We’re not going to give you a tour,” Eric told her. “We’re going to spank you.”
“First me,” Reeve said, staking his claim. “Then him.”
Bless her, Sandy didn’t run now either. She stood her ground and didn’t seem even to be shaking. “Why?” she guardedly asked. “I haven’t done anything wrong. I haven’t—”
“You argued with us,” Eric countered. “You defied us.”
You entered here based on a lie, but Reeve didn’t say that out loud.
Neither did Eric, though he surely had to be thinking it. Instead, with an offhanded shrug, he added, “Plus, a spanking is always the first thing a submissive receives once he or she has been settled in with their new dom.”
“Why?” She looked from one to the other, openly confused. “What if I don’t want a spanking?”
“Why would you not want a spanking?” Reeve countered, all but challenging her to remember that not only was she supposed to be a submissive, but she had marked impact play as one of her interests on her application. Probably because it had been the least objectionable or frightening thing they offered.
The wheels of her thoughts were turning. He could all but see her coming to that same conclusion.
“It’s a win-win,” Eric agreed. “Plus, over the years we’ve discovered the very act of coming here tends to be nerve-wracking to our guests. Most have had months and months of waiting and anticipating what might or might not happen d
uring their stay. They corral themselves in long flights or long drives.”
“Followed by the bus ride in,” Reeve added. “That’s when heightened expectations and second-guessing hits the hardest. Did they fill out their questionnaire correctly? Did they sign up for too much or not enough? What if they don’t like it?”
“What if we don’t like them?” Eric began ticking the worries off on his fingers as if he’d heard this litany of woes too many times to count. “What if they’re too fat, too thin, too old, too disabled, too submissive, not submissive enough…”
“What if, after spending all this money and coming all this way, they find out they’re not cut out for the lifestyle?”
“Some have a little experience.” Eric had to switch hands to keep counting. “Some have none at all—”
“Like me,” Sandy interjected.
Reeve was surprised she was willing to admit to that. “Like you.”
Eric took over. “Because so many submissives work themselves into absolute frenzies just trying to get here, a spanking is a simple, easy way to help them relax again. Done right, it helps them tune in with their submissive side faster, plus it’s a great way to get comfortable with and learn to trust the dominant they’ve been matched with. For you, we’re going to do it because you’ve earned it.”
She tried to laugh, as if she thought they were joking. “No, I haven’t.”
“You called us jackasses,” Eric reminded her.
Rubbing her hands, Sandy looked from one to the other. Did she even know how traitorous her own lovely eyes were? They told him every nervous thought as it went scampering through her mind.
“We’re going to take turns,” Reeve said, just for the pleasure of watching her confidence falter. “And no, you won’t take it quietly.”
Eric grinned. “Or gracefully.”
“Or with any kind of dignity at all. Because you’re going to go over my knee first, like the naughty, argumentative,” he stressed, just to watch her blush deepen and her breath catch, “disrespectful submissive that you have been.”
“And just when you think you can’t take any more from him—” Eric spread his arms in an all-encompassing shrug, “—then it’ll be my turn. This is what I’ll use.” Eric held up his hand; she looked at it as if there were a tarantula perched on his palm. “Only this, I promise, but I’m not going to stop. Not for a good, long time.”
Not until he’d stripped her down to the rawness of her most vulnerable being and she was crying like a baby. And in that state, she would know what both he and Eric, and every other Master within these walls had known from the moment she stepped off their bus.
She hadn’t fooled anybody.
Chapter 3
Her knees were shaking. They were actually shaking, the entire way up the ornate staircase that wrapped from the Grand Hall to the second-floor balcony and with every step she took down the long series of residential wings until they passed the plaque that read Royalty. By the time they reached the massive wooden door that blocked access to their bedroom, it had gotten so bad that it was a wonder she could stand at all. That door didn’t help. Built out of thick planks and iron bands, with a wrought iron handle that had no latch, it looked more like the entrance to a medieval dungeon, which was appropriate since she was about to be tortured. Well, okay. That was a bit melodramatic. She was about to be spanked. Internally, the two were starting to feel like one and the same.
Fishing a keycard out of his pocket, Reeve tapped it to the mounting plate of the door’s wrought iron handle. An internal lock clicked, granting them access. It was a weirdly modern touch in a place so overwhelmingly medieval that at first her brain didn’t know how to process it. Or maybe it was everything else that her brain didn’t know how to process. Like how dark their room first appeared when Reeve pushed open the door, or the ominous shape of the shadows that lurked just outside the scope of what light spilled in through the door around her and the heavy drapes of the closed window across from her. The warm touch of Reeve’s hand on the small of her back coaxed her in ahead of him, while he held the door. Like a gentleman. Who was about to put her across his knee and spank her.
She shivered.
And then Eric would take his turn. She shivered even harder, the skin on her bottom positively crawling with dread. It was the oddest sensation and God help her, but her journalistic mind kept trying to capture the sensation in words so she could write about it later on. There was a light switch on the wall, the only modern touch that she could see, and she did see it because Reeve pushed aside the fake brick cover plate and flicked it on.
“Home sweet away from home,” Eric said, as the door swung closed behind them.
Sandy stood rooted only a few feet inside, drinking in every inch of that truly massive four-poster bed, which she was going to share tonight… with two men… and how much more than just sleep were they going to do? She didn’t know; what’s more, she didn’t know why she wasn’t objecting. Maybe it was because she’d been celibate since her divorce, more than nine years earlier. Or maybe because, like Wendy, some small part of her wanted to do something wild and crazy while she was still young enough to enjoy it.
That bed certainly fit the ‘wild and crazy’ bill. The entire frame from floor to ceiling, and all down the sides, was studded with metal rings. The only other furniture consisted of a massive claw-foot wardrobe with a matching dresser, and two sturdy straight-backed chairs. There was no table, though, and that was odd. A closed door to her immediate left led either into a closet or a bathroom. Her hope was for a bathroom. She didn’t care how expensive this place was, she didn’t think she had it in her to visit an old-fashioned castle garderobe, where the toilets consisted of nothing more than holes cut in a stone bench. No running water; no stench control.
The “sink” located on this side of that closed door certainly conformed to the rest of the Castle’s medieval theme. A pitcher of room temperature water, it was set beside a shallow washing basin (at least that was plumbed) with a stack of clean hand cloths to the side. A poured glass mirror hung on the wall and two fake electric torches provided all the flickering light a girl might need to apply her morning makeup.
“You guys are very authentic.” She stared at her mildly warped reflection.
“Thank you,” Reeve replied. “Now, take off your panties.”
Sandy’s heart did the most incredible double-thump directly against her breastbone. “I beg your pardon?”
“Your undergarments,” Eric obligingly spelled out, slipping past her to pull the two chairs tucked up against the draped window out into the middle of the room, where just about anybody could trip on them. And fall. Probably over a waiting lap.
Her bottom crawled again. “I thought, um, Eric—”
“Master Eric,” Eric corrected, adjusting the spacing of the chairs.
“Yeah… was supposed to do that,” she finished. Pausing in his adjustment of the chairs, Eric chuckled. The low rumbling sound left no doubt that he’d noticed her not-so-subtle avoidance of the dreaded M-word.
The darker, taller, sterner Master Reeve noticed it too. His frown deepened and his jaw clenched.
“I think I’ll give it to him.” Eric winked.
How magnanimous. Sandy only just resisted the urge to reach back and rub the crawling from her skin.
The heat of Reeve’s chest closed in behind her. He leaned down, the caress of his breath shivering her even worse than before. “I’m waiting.”
The bulk of him behind her blocked her access to the door. He was probably hanging out here because he thought she might run. Was she going to run? Her legs were still shaking, but there was a weird thrill of energy zipping through her limbs that felt an awful lot like ‘fight or flight’ vibes. She tried to calm them. She’d asked for this, after all. She’d fought for this, even. Her boss had walked her through the signup process when he’d paid her admission, but she’d seen every question and approved every answer. Including the one about to tak
e place here: the spanking. She’d agreed to take it because, first, she was supposed to be a submissive and she wanted to blend in, and second because… well, she really honestly had read every Fifty Shades book. She’d also seen the movies. And liked them. And okay, maybe she was a little curious as to why anyone would pay this kind of money to come here if nothing illegal, immoral or criminal was going on.
Reeve waited only so long for her to answer. “Do I need to lift your skirts and shuck them down myself? You were given an order and we expect prompt and honest obedience.”
Was it a trick of her ears or had he put an emphasis on ‘honest’? What, did he think she was lying about her underwear?
“I am too wearing some,” she said, a little offended.
“I said, take them off,” Reeve repeated.
She’d signed up for this, but, damn, it was happening so much faster than she was prepared for. “You know; I-I really think I’m okay w-with not getting sp—”
“Go right now to the wardrobe,” Reeve interrupted, his heavy hand falling onto her shoulder, pushing her deeper into the room. “I want you to see exactly why you should re-think the making of this particular mistake.”
Chuckling again, Eric shrugged out of his coat, draping it across the back of the chair he then sat upon to roll up his shirt sleeves. Turn after turn, the sinewy strength of his forearms was revealed, but that didn’t do anywhere near as much fluttering damage to the pit of her stomach as did the sight of Reeve’s broad, thick, scar-dotted fingers did. There were so very many, dozens and dozens of short, white lines that crisscrossed his hand all the way up the back until his coat sleeve swallowed them from sight. What, had he wrestled a barbed wire fence? She couldn’t for the life of her imagining him coming out of that scrap the loser.
“One,” Reeve warned.
“Two,” Eric immediately seconded.
Jesus, they were counting to three. When they hit it, ready or not, she was going to get the spanking she was stalling to avoid, and she didn’t need anyone to tell her how much worse it would be for making them count.
