Masters of the Castle: Witness Protection Program

by Maren Smith

  “I’m sorry!” she wailed, her tears flowing free once more.

  He’d heard enough of that phrase for one day. “Bow,” he snapped, and she did, dropping all the way down until her hands and her forehead were pressed flat upon the red and gold area rug beneath her. He wouldn’t have cared if she were on bare stone. He stepped on the back of her head, crushing the tidy brunette bun that tied up her hair and knocking her servant’s mobcap askew. Careful of his weight, he held her down. He didn’t much care for this. Such shows of dominance and subservience had never tickled the fancy of the beast within, but every instinct he had said she needed this and he gave it without hesitation.

  It worked. The force of her weeping lessened, turning to hiccups and then the ragged breathing. Finally, it eased into silence. The curve of her back relaxed, and so did her hands. Only when she was calm and quiet once more, did he lift his foot back off her.

  “Knees,” he commanded. She immediately obeyed, pushing up into a kneeling posture, her back straight, her head high, her hands upon her knees turned up with her palms open—ready to receive whatever he chose to give her. “Tell me what happened.”

  Her throat worked, swallowing hard once, but when she answered it was with the same soft measure of calm in which he had spoken to her. “I lost my collar today. I don’t know where or when.”

  His gaze dropped to her throat. He was slipping. He hadn’t even noticed. “Go on.”

  “He caught me in the Library. I had emptied the trash and was reorganizing the books, and I didn’t hear him come in until he was right behind me.”

  Grimsley had to think before he could recall the name on the demerit slip. “Master Declan?”

  “Yes,” Bianca whispered.

  “Did you use your safeword?” Grimsley asked, cutting to the end. He didn’t need the details. He’d worked in this business long enough to know how those particular blanks would fill in.

  Blinking back a fresh onslaught of tears, Bianca shook her head. “No, sir.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Giving a quick tug at the legs of his pants, Grimsley hunkered down to her eye level. His gaze was steady. More than one submissive in his past had referred to it as ‘hard’ and ‘difficult to hold.’ He’d always thought Master Marshall the king of such looks, but after only a second, Bianca tried to look away.

  “Look at me,” he commanded.

  She visibly struggled to obey, but he waited until she managed it.

  “Why not?” he asked again.

  Her brow pinched. Blinking hard, she swallowed again but the confusion and self-condemnation was thick in her voice when all she could give was the same useless answer as before. “I don’t know.”

  From any other submissive, that would have been a copout answer, and one he wouldn’t have tolerated. But one look at Bianca told him she really didn’t know and she was baffled by it.

  “So, it’s my fault,” she said again. “I didn’t give the safeword… I just ran away.”

  And so, pride stung, the visiting ‘Master’ had hunted down the first security guard he could find and filed a complaint against her behavior. Something usually done out of fun with Little Maids who loved getting into trouble.

  Rising, Grimsley returned to his desk. Gathering the demerit, he sat and from a lower desk drawer, pulled out a sheet of thick paper.

  Leaving Bianca trembling in silence, he wrote a note to an old friend. It only took a few lines. Once done, he folded the paper—first in half and then again, using his nail to sharpen the crease.

  Returning to the rug where Bianca knelt, he handed her the note. He didn’t need to seal the ends. He already knew she wouldn’t read it. Unlike the other two women on his outside bench, she wasn’t the prying kind.

  “I want you to take this to the main kitchen. Give it to Cook Connie,” he told her sternly, “and no other. You will wait while she reads it and then you will do what she tells you, is that clear?”

  Looking from the note in her hand to him, Bianca stammered, “Y-you’re not going to punish me?”

  “No, I’m not.” He motioned for her to rise. “Go on. I have a busy day ahead and so do you.”

  Hesitating, she gave him a last uncertain look, then turned to go.

  “Bianca,” he called after her. When she paused at the door, against his better judgement, he said, “A submissive is not a failure because she uses her safeword when she should. She’s a failure when she doesn’t—to herself and the Dom who puts his trust in her.”

  Her brow beetled again. Hurt flashed through her brown eyes, but he did not and would not apologize for the harshness of what he’d said. She needed to hear it, especially if she was going to play at the Castle.

  Only after Bianca was gone did Grimsley take out the office phone all Masters kept hidden somewhere in their offices and apartments. He sent Cook Connie a text, followed by a pager-buzz to alert her of who was coming and why, and ended the transmission with a request for hot tea. While he waited, he filled out a change of program request for Bianca, put it in an envelope and drew the bell pull by the door, summoning a runner to the room. The runner and tea arrived at the same time. Sending the program change request to Marshall’s office, he had the tea steeping in a cup on his desk before opening his door again, this time to summon Josie.

  True to rebellious form, she was scrambling to justify the unjustifiable before he had fully closed the door for privacy. Not that his office was soundproof. No Master’s office was. Personally, Grimsley thought it did a naughty submissive good to have to listen while someone else was punished, especially knowing her turn would be coming up next. But outside on that bench, Eden wasn’t being treated to the sounds of remorse or profound apologies meant to stay whatever switch-strokes might be coming. This was theatrics, pure and simple. Grimsley didn’t have a lot of patience for that.

  “That bitch had it coming, I swear to God!” Josie clenched her fists at her sides as she stalked the length of his office. Stopping only because she’d reached his desk, she started pacing in front of it instead. “I saw him first, Master Grimsley. Me! I was already talking to him for like, twenty minutes before she comes simpering up to him.” Her voice shot into a high mocking pitch as she sneered, “Oh, Master Aldric, what big biceps you have! Seriously? I could vomit.”

  He understood the temptation. He was a little sick of having to deal with other people when the woman who’d most attracted his attention was sitting right outside his office door. Still, Grimsley let her get it out of her system while he walked past her and selected two forms from his lower desk drawer. He laid them side by side on her end of his desk, with a pen placed neatly in the half inch of neutral space between them.

  Noticing them, Josie stopped pacing.

  “Make your choice,” he said calmly, sitting down.

  Tipping her head slightly, Josie didn’t move. “What kind of choice? You’ve never had me make a choice before.”

  “I know, and that was a mistake on my part. The problem is,” he said as she edged closer to the forms, “you are not a guest. I seem to be saying that a lot today, but you don’t get to play whenever you want to. In between assignments, there is work to be done. You’ve been here almost a year; you know this. So, the choice I’ve given you is this: You can either sign the consent form agreeing to be disciplined by me in whatever manner I see fit, or you can sign the other form, which terminates you from the Little Maid program. Now, Marshall might decide to relocate you somewhere else in the Castle, however, considering the totality of your offense, I wouldn’t bet on it if I were you.”

  “The totality?” She flinched. “But that’s so unfair. I don’t understand. I’m not—”

  “Yes, you are,” Grimsley cut her off. “And you’re right, it is grossly unfair. Unfair that I be made to have this same argument with you over and over again. Unfair that I be made to supervise your every move when you’ve been here almost a year and should be able to supervise yourself
.” He held her gaze when she looked up, startled, from the form in her hand. “It’s incredibly unfair that I be backed into the corner of having to discipline you yet again for what amounts to the same offense. I have done so once a month, sometimes two or even three times, practically from the day you graduated out of your probationary period and were hired full-time.”

  That wrinkling in her brow faltered. Dropping both forms back on his desk, she picked up the pen. Instead of signing, however, she fidgeted, twisting it between her fingers. “I don’t know wh… what you want me to say.”

  “I want you to confess that you are doing it deliberately because you like it.” That tell-tale catch in her breathing was all Grimsley needed to know he’d just put his finger on the pulse of the real problem behind Josie’s recurring visits. He picked up her demerit and quietly re-read it. “There was no altercation, was there?”

  Her grip on the pen shifted again. She didn’t look at him. “No, sir.”

  “Mm-hm.” Grimsley laid the demerit aside. “Josie, do you have a stolen notepad of blank demerit forms somewhere in your possession?”

  Her eyes closed. He glimpsed a watery sheen when she scrubbed at them with the back of her wrist. Sniffling, she nodded.

  “If I pull your employee file and line up your past demerits, will I find the complainant’s signature to be the same on all of them because you are forging that signature?”

  All trace of her earlier anger was gone now, utterly replaced by guilt. Josie nodded again. “Yes,” she whispered.

  “With one signature in place, I imagine it’s not difficult to find a busy security guard willing to scrawl his necessary agreement at the bottom just to avoid dealing with one more thing.”

  She neither agreed nor disagreed, but at this point, she didn’t need to. The slump of her shoulders said everything Grimsley needed to know. Everything except the final question he couldn’t help but ask.

  “Why?”

  She tipped him the most forlorn look. “Because it quiets the need.”

  The admission tickled at the core of him, something he wasn’t used to feeling in the privacy of his office and especially not when it came to disciplining his staff. He blamed Eden, sitting on the bench just outside, waiting her turn to come creeping up to take Josie’s place before him. Just thinking about her turned his tickle into a throb of wanton desire so out of place that at first, he couldn’t believe he’d felt it. And then he couldn’t banish it. The throb became a steady pulse, centered low in his balls where each thrum turned molten, and tugged and pulled at his rapidly stirring cock.

  Grimsley stood up. He had to. The longer he kept sitting there, the more unbearable it was growing. He leaned forward, hands braced upon his desk and the growing tent in the front of his trousers hidden in shadow. That was the last thing he wanted Josie to become aware of. His butler’s jacket was long in back, but short at the waist in front, and it did not cover it.

  “I know it was stupid, I know,” Josie said, voice cracking. “Am I going to get fired?”

  “That depends on you,” he said. “Make your choice.”

  He was giving ultimatums to the wrong woman and every inch of him knew it. And yet, Grimsley couldn’t help the thrum of base excitement building in his veins. Josie might be the submissive in the room, but it was Eden he was tuning into. Eden, whom he couldn’t wait to get through this… this chore… for, so that he could move on to the pleasure of seeing if once more she might just drop to her knees in front of him. Her teary blue eyes pleading up at him for… hell, she probably wouldn’t even know what she was pleading for, but he knew. Every humming, pulsing, aching-for-action muscle and sinew inside him knew exactly what pleading would get her.

  He had to get away from Josie. While she bent her head to read the forms, he stormed the length of the room to the antique mahogany wardrobe in the far corner. He opened both doors and busied himself with making a choice of his own. His own breathing sounded abnormally loud in his ears. So did the scratching of Josie’s pen as she finally signed one of the forms.

  “Please don’t tell Master Marshall,” she begged, letting him know without needing to look which option she preferred. “I won’t ever do it again, I swear.”

  “Bend over,” he told her, still facing the wardrobe because if he turned around now, his cock would be leading the way. This was deplorable. What kind of man was he to be in charge of anything if he couldn’t even master himself? “Hands flat on the desk. Eyes forward.”

  He waited until the soft rustle of her movements told him she had obeyed. His hand was moving, making a selection of its own, before he realized what he was doing. All he knew was, it felt like an obscenely long time before he could make himself turn from the closet. He still had a full-on erection when he took up his position behind Josie.

  Her hair was the wrong color blonde, several inches too short, and it didn’t curl anywhere near enough. Her legs were too long, but then Josie was taller than Eden. Short as her French maid’s uniform was, he didn’t have to bare her in order to line his switch up with the quivering orbs of a backside he had no real interest in thrashing. Still, that tickle of lust remained with him. Not only that, but it was building. Becoming something that felt almost like anticipation. Finishing with Josie meant he would be free to turn his disciplinarian’s eye on Eden.

  God, he could almost imagine her bent over his desk just like this, with her trembling legs squeezed in dread and her buttocks clenching against the impending pain. He could see every quiver in Eden’s lithesome little body as she fought her instincts not to scramble, not just out of position but somewhere, anywhere that the switch in his hand could not reach her.

  That was all right. As much as he liked to avoid any undue touching of the submissives on his staff, she wouldn’t be the first one he’d ever pinned down. He could hold her hands, if that was what she needed. He could lean his weight into the small of her back to help keep her in position, from first stroke to last if necessary, but even as he laid the first sharp snap across Josie’s tense backside, in his mind, Grimsley could already see himself laying the switch aside for Eden.

  No, for the woman who had evoked this irrational of a response in him, he wasn’t just going to lay his switch aside, he was going to remove his coat to free himself for greater and more exuberant ranges of motion. He could see his hand, raising all the ruffled layers of her uniform skirt and laying them across her back so that he could clearly see the wandering caress of his own fingers as he travelled the downward curve of her hips to her buttocks, hooked the elastic band of her underwear and skinned it down to the backs of her knees.

  Baring was intimate. It increased vulnerability and embarrassment. It was what a Dom delighted in doing to the submissive he intended to fuck. In all the years Grimsley had been doing this job, not once had he ever bared a Little Maid in his office. Tonight was different.

  Tonight, he was going to bare Eden.

  Chapter 4

  Eden jumped when she heard the whippy ‘whick’ of the switch fall yet again. The poor girl inside wasn’t yelping anymore. She was sobbing and, squirming where she sat, Eden could hear every nuance of it through the door—the whip of the implement slicing the air, the crisp ‘snick’ as it bit into flesh, the high-pitched suck of air followed by the gasps, groans and escalating cries of the victim inside.

  “Please, I’m sorry!” the poor girl wailed. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”

  Eden was sorry, too. Whatever that Little Maid had done, it must have been horrible, and that scared Eden to pieces. Master Grimsley had said he was taking them in order of the severity of their sins. The first woman had left without any spanking at all. From the sounds of it, the second would be lucky if she got out of there with any skin left on her backside, and where did that leave Eden? She’d been caught eavesdropping. Considering everything else that had happened between her and the Master Butler, frankly, that was proving to be the highpoint of their relationship so far.

  The flesh a
cross her bottom positively crawled as the whipping tempo intensified. Eden heard the low rumble of Master Grimsley’s voice coming through the door, followed by the woman’s shrill, “Yes, sir!”

  Three sharp snaps of impact followed and then a pause as another indecipherable command was issued, or maybe it was a question. Eden couldn’t hear anything that Grimsley was saying and no way was she getting up from this bench to press her ear to the door and hear him better. That was what had got her into this mess to begin with. It was what had her sitting here, waiting her turn for the same unholy treatment, frozen, with her hands gripped so tightly that her fingers were turning purple. No way could she survive worse than what that girl was getting!

  No way could she take half of what that girl already had!

  Another sharp snap of the switch and the Little Maid shrieked, then broke down sobbing. Louder and harder than before. “Yes! I promise!”

  Eden’s heart was thundering in her chest. She couldn’t think. All she could do was listen—to the fearsome sounds of that spanking and the climbing desperation in the poor maid’s cries. To the out-of-tempo pounding taking place in her own head and veins and, heaven have mercy, even between her legs where her pussy had flared so hot, so fast, because it was just a body part, and it was responding out of favor with the rest of her regarding what was happening right now.

  “Not my thighs! Pl-ee-ease!”

  Eden shuddered, the errant sensation dancing with such evil enjoyment all the way down her spine. She squirmed again, the pressure of just sitting on this hard bench having the most damnable effect on her. Tiny shivers crawled across the backs of her thighs. She’d never had her thighs spanked before, but she knew it was terrible. Not from the renewed shouts of the woman behind that closed door, but because Eden was a voracious reader with a healthy imagination. For most of her life, her fantasies had revolved around dominant men and the inevitability that sooner or later they always spanked the women they loved. Always. It was practically a law within the genre and regardless of all else that had happened today, she really wasn’t one for breaking laws.