by Maren Smith
Not that finding a man to love her was her biggest reason for getting a job at the Castle, but she had thought if she managed to get through her probationary period, she might have an easy time finding someone to play with. This was a building full of Masters, Doms, and Tops, both visiting and living here. She was young, attractive, submissive, and an all-round nice person to be near. Surely someone sometime would strike up a conversation with her and, maybe over the course of being drawn together for days or weeks or whatever, they’d find things they liked to do in common.
Maybe spanking would come up ever so nonchalantly over a cup of coffee. Or maybe she might get caught doing something a little bit naughty. Nothing big, of course. Nothing that broke any major rules—or got her sucked in amongst bomb-sniffers and assassins. Something small. Something sassy and playful that the faceless Dom of her dreams might take one look at and know—just know—that the only and proper course of action was to take her somewhere private, bend her into position over a chair or a table or even his knee, so that fantasy and reality could collide in hot, orgasm-inducing sparks alongside the repetitive claps of his hand as he smacked her bottom until she couldn’t sit down for a week.
That was all. She wasn’t asking for much, except…
Except spankings like that didn’t happen playfully or with the palm of a Dom’s hand clapping orgasmically. Spankings like that happened the way it was happening in the Master Butler’s office, where the whipping had finally ended, but the woman still sobbed as if she were completely broken by the experience.
Did she really want that to be her?
Eden jumped when the door swung open and out walked Master Grimsley. Her heart leapt into the back of her throat when he looked at her. His dark brown eyes positively smoldered as they bored into her. He looked powerful, invigorated. Ready to tackle… her heart fluttered—her, she suddenly realized. He was ready to tackle her. Showers of heat came alive in the pit of her churning stomach. It flowed, spilling down in trickles between the folds of her pulsing sex.
Without a word, Grimsley stepped aside to allow the other maid to come shuffling out into the hall. Her head was down, her hands were clenched, her uniform was straight but her skirt was so short, it did nothing at all to hide the ladder of crisscrossing welts that marred her from well up under those ruffles to a point almost four inches down onto the tops of her thighs.
“Sit,” he ordered, staring right at Eden but still not talking to her.
Eden suppressed a full-body shudder as the other maid shuffled over to the bench and, whimpering, lowered herself to perch beside Eden with as little of her bottom touching the bench as possible.
“You will not speak to one another,” Master Grimsley directed, the unwavering intensity of his stare piercing through Eden like knives. “You will not move from this spot. I will return in but a moment.”
Disappearing back into his office, Master Grimsley closed the door. Weighted silence fell over the hallway.
Rubbing her hands against her knees, her belly tangling in so many knots she didn’t even know how to begin to relax again, Eden glanced sideways at the other maid. The woman was weaving a little, staring straight at the wall ahead of them with a gaze that was anything but focused.
Grimsley had said to be silent but, unable to stand it, Eden whispered, “Are you okay?”
Turning her head, the maid looked at her. “Huh?”
Holy shit, Eden thought with a start. The woman was high!
Her face was flushed, but then anyone who’d taken that kind of spanking would be. Her gaze was as unfocused as any Eden had ever seen. She looked dazed and unsteady, drugged. Subspace, Eden suddenly realized. Now and then, she read about it in the books she liked to read. She didn’t fully understand the purpose of it, much less the concept, or how it worked, but if she had to guess, the Master Butler had spanked his Little Maid right into subspace.
A million questions shot through Eden’s mind, even as the horror and intrigue of it zipped right through the core of her to land with another intoxicating thump between her quivering legs. She squeezed her thighs tighter together, hoping to still the sensation long enough to let her think.
“What…” Shooting a quick glance back at the closed door to Grimsley’s office, she lowered her voice to the softest whisper she could manage. “What did he use?”
It took three blinks before the other maid could make sense of the question. “Oh,” she finally said, then sighed. “His switch. He only ever uses the switch.”
“Like that?” Eden whispered, wishing she could be more horrified and less aroused by what she’d heard. “Why would you let him do that to you?” Why did she want him to do that to her now, too?
The maid blinked, her brows drawing together in confusion. She shook her head, as if it were Eden who wasn’t making sense, and said, “Because it quiets the need.”
The need. Eden shrank from her even as she felt that languid pulse of wanting thump up through her sex to her molten womb.
Grimsley’s office door opened again, killing the slew of half-thought-out questions already rushing to flee off Eden’s tongue. She snapped her mouth shut and quickly faced forward again. Any hope she had that the Master Butler might be given no cause to suspect them of consorting was dashed, however, because the other maid didn’t follow suit. She just stared at Eden, still trying in her drugged-out haze to figure Eden out, right up until the Master Butler walked up and took her wrist in his hand.
She looked at his hand first, and then followed it up to his face. She melted, smiling. “Hi.”
“Mmhm,” he replied, not smiling back although Eden thought she detected a little smugness in his tone. Slipping a folded note into her palm and folding her fingers over it, he said, “I am sending you to Master Marshall’s office. You will tell him exactly what you did and why, you will make immediate arrangements to return the stolen demerit pad, and then you are to give him this note.”
“But…” the woman protested, a rush of tears flooding to her confused eyes. “You said I wouldn’t get fired.”
“You’re not getting fired.”
“You’re moving me to another program, then,” she cried, as if that were worse.
“I am not moving you to a different program,” Master Grimsley said and, although he didn’t quite roll his eyes, he came close to it. “Although I dare say you can probably expect another thrashing from him once you’ve healed from this one.”
A flash of movement from further down the hall caught Eden’s attention. It was another runner, a middle-aged woman dressed in the same white Roman-style tunic as before. She was barefoot, without makeup of any kind. Her long brown hair was pulled back in a simple ponytail and the only adornments she wore were the slave cuffs on her wrists and ankles.
Ducking around Master Grimsley, she did not announce herself, but waited patiently until he noticed her.
“Escort Josie to Master Marshall’s office. You are to wait in the waiting area until he is done with her and then you are to escort her to her room. Before you leave her, she is to be given water, something small to eat, and then she is to take a nap. Is that clear?”
“Yes, Master Grimsley,” the runner obediently replied.
Turning to the other maid, Master Grimsley sternly lowered his tone. “Is that clear, Josie?”
“I’m getting fired.” She broke down, crying.
Slipping under her arm, the runner helped her up. “Come on,” she said, not without sympathy. “One foot in front of the other. Let’s go see Master Marshall.”
Grimsley watched from his office doorway until they turned the far corner. Eden could hear Josie crying long after she couldn’t see her. For reasons she didn’t fully understand, she felt awful for the other maid.
“Last but not least,” said Master Grimsley, holding open his office door.
Her whole body came alive with shivers. The way he was holding it for her meant that in order for her to slip past him, she’d have had to duck under his arm
. Had he planned it that way? Was he doing it so he could swat her as she squeaked by? On shaky legs, Eden moved toward him. He didn’t swat her, but she kept expecting it to the point that she only managed a handful of steps beyond the doorway before she stopped in the middle of his office, unable to venture another step more.
She heard him enter behind her and then the door shut. It was a strange sensation, to at once feel this trapped and yet know she could have left at any point. All she had to do was turn and start walking—or running—or hell, yell the Castle safeword at the top of her lungs and wait for security to come running. Or was that an option only guests got? This was probably not the moment to ask for clarification, and especially not from the one man she didn’t want to know she was losing her courage to.
Turning slowly, she faced him. Questions never hurt anybody, right? Probably not. Except the question she heard pouring out of her when she at last worked up the nerve to open her mouth didn’t have anything to do with safewords. “Did you fire her?”
With his butler’s jacket half off his shoulders, Master Grimsley flashed her a half-startled, half-annoyed frown. “Of all the people you should be most concerned about right now, I don’t believe Josie should number first on that list.”
He hung his coat up on the wooden rack in the corner by the door. Although he turned that frown on his cufflinks next, Eden was pretty sure it was her he was still cross with. Especially when she didn’t immediately change topics.
“But did you, though?” she persisted. “You fired the other lady this morning, and she didn’t even steal anything. She just laughed.”
“She didn’t laugh,” Grimsley corrected. “She snickered, showing a gross lack of respect for authority. And then, when I gave her the opportunity to correct herself, what did she do?”
Both cufflinks unfastened now, he paused in the act of rolling up his sleeves to pin Eden with a waiting arch of both eyebrows. She blinked, trying to think that far back, but already this morning felt as if it had happened a lifetime ago.
“She said ‘what,’” he reminded her, “as if she were a teenager in full defiance mode.” With one sleeve now turned up past his elbow, he switched to his other arm. “Tell me, Eden. What do you think she should have said instead?”
Eden barely heard the question. Her mouth had run so dry, not even swallowing could bring the moisture back. Grimsley’s uniform had been horribly deceptive, the coat and sleeves working together to hide the muscular contours of his body from everyone. Only, she was seeing it now. He was tall and, lord, was he thin, but his was a wiry strength revealed with every tug and turn of his sleeves rolling up over standing veins and sinewy muscle.
“I-I don’t…” She swallowed again.
“What would you have said?” Both sleeves now up past his elbows, he pinned his dark stare straight on her and did not look away. His hands seemed frighteningly capable, braced as they were upon his lean hips.
“I-I…” Catching her breath, she tried to kill her nervous stammer. She also tried to stop staring at his hands. “I would have said ‘I’m sorry.’”
“And you did, if I recall,” he said, slipping a half step closer. He was so much taller than she was. The top of her head could not have been higher than his shoulder, which meant the closer he came, the more she had to crane back her neck to keep contact with his gaze. The longer he stared, the more convinced she became that he was seeing straight through the unshuttered windows of her eyes and into her wayward soul. That awful prickling dread moved across her butt again. Spreading upward and outward, it tickled up through the folds of her twitching pussy and tugged at her clit.
It tickled at her nipples too. And behind her ears, for some really obscure reason she wasn’t sure she wanted to examine too closely, until eventually she could even feel it tickling at her lips, especially when she licked them.
Now she wasn’t looking at his eyes, she was looking at his mouth, with this freakishly errant thought skittering through her brain, making her wonder what it might be like to be kissed by him.
If he noticed the direction her gaze had wandered, he didn’t mention it. “If I recall correctly, what you said was: I’m sorry, Master Grimsley. I won’t be distracted again. That is, however, neither here nor there. You are not the woman I fired this morning. You are not Josie, either, which is why we aren’t going to talk about them. We’re going to talk about you.”
Eden swallowed past the tightness in her throat. “Why would you beat her like that if you knew all along you were going to send her to Master Marshall to be fired?”
Hands on hips, the Master Butler studied her, unimpressed and unamused. She ought to let go of this; she didn’t know why she couldn’t. Because he was right, it didn’t have anything to do with her. She didn’t know Josie. She didn’t owe her anything and certainly couldn’t champion her. The maid was gone already. Probably talking to Marshall right now, so her fate was done, decided.
“All right,” Grimsley grudgingly countered. “I see we are going to talk about it, after all.” Drawing a deep, calming breath, he said, “Number one, I did not ‘beat’ her. I disciplined her. It was a number three rattan switch, to be specific. I gave her thirty-two strokes—twelve to warm up, and the remaining twenty with all the severity I could muster, because Josie and I have a carefully negotiated, year-long relationship in which discipline has been discussed, and agreed upon, multiple times. Forty strokes is her maximum, and initially I was going to give her that. But, and I only mention it because you have called my judgment into question, I feared that giving her more at this time might cause her skin to split and bleed, and that is a hard limit for her.”
“Don’t.” Eden stumbled back when he took a step toward her. The very nearness of him had the air humming like an electrified wire between them.
With another step, he reclaimed the distance she’d put between them, stealing from her a few precious inches more in the process. “Don’t what?” he asked, his dark eyes as hard as the Castle stones.
“Don’t for a second say you did any of that for her.” Where she got the courage to argue with him, she didn’t know. She was shaking, trembling so badly it was a wonder her knees didn’t buckle. “I know exactly what she looked like when you left her sitting in the hallway with me.”
“Are you saying I did something inappropriate?” he asked, dangerously calm.
She honestly didn’t know if it was inappropriate, but she didn’t understand it or how it could be right for him to do that to someone and then leave them in that state. “I-I—”
“Would you like to report my actions to Master Marshall for an official review?”
Oh yeah, then she could get fired, too.
Eden didn’t say that, but something must have shown on her face, because in subtle shifts, his expression changed from ‘hints of annoyance’ to ‘openly annoyed’ in the time it took her blink.
“For the record, I didn’t leave her in the hallway. I left her with you.” Taking his hands off his hips, he folded his arms across his chest instead. The veins and sinew in his forearms bulged. He didn’t have Master Jackson’s burly physique, but in that moment, he definitely looked stronger than she was. Her nipples swelled, rubbing against the sack-cloth roughness of her costume’s silken interior. “I’m going to give you the same choice I gave Josie and, in fact, everyone who finds him or herself standing before me with demerit in hand. So long as you don’t rouse my ire further, you won’t lose your job, regardless of what you chose.”
Rouse his ire? How long had this man been pretending to be a Victorian butler? Seriously, who talked like that?
“Piss me off,” Grimsley corrected with dangerous softness.
She really had to figure out how to make her face stop saying what she was thinking. “I’m sorry.”
“Apologies lose their meaning when you say them all the time.” Glaring, he stalked past her, making his way to his desk. “I’m done giving you demerits.”
Sitting down, he pulled
two slips of paper from one of the drawers. Laying them on his desk, he slapped a pen on top of them and slumped back in his chair, relaxing with his hands folded in his lap. It was as if he’d just washed them of her. “Take your pick. I really don’t care which you choose.”
She thought she glimpsed a flicker of annoyance at the reluctance with which she approached the opposite side of his desk. By the time she reached it, however, that unflappable butler’s mask of his was once more firmly in place. Heaven only knew what he was thinking then.
Eden picked up the first sheet of crisp, creamy paper. It was an employee disciplinary form.
“Castle protocol dictates that you have the option of receiving your disciplinary review with either the person who gave you the demerit, your program supervisor, or Master Marshall,” Grimsley explained. “Being as I am both the man who gave you the demerits and your program supervisor, that leaves you two options: me or him.”
“And since going to Marshall might get me fired, then I should let you handle it,” she guessed, following that train of thought to its most likely conclusion.
“No,” Grimsley bit out, annoyance back again. “Everyone always assumes that. If you are going to get fired, it means you did something to deserve it. Walking into me three times in the course of one day is not a firing offense. Nor is it a firing offense to snicker during my morning speech. I fired that woman because she proved not to understand the most basic concept of respecting a Dominant of the Castle, and one who also happens to be her boss. Despite wearing a submissive’s armband, either she was not as submissive as she hoped to portray, or she was trying to show that I was not her Dom and therefore she didn’t have to respect me. Either way, that is a disciplinary problem I don’t need to keep hashing out over the next ninety days. Not that I owe you any explanations, but that is why I let her go. Eavesdropping, snooping into business that does not involve you can cost you your job, particularly on your first day, but Marshall already knows about that, darling.”
