Masters of the Castle: Witness Protection Program

by Maren Smith

  The endearment rolled off his tongue as if it belonged there and promptly struck her in the chest. It quivered there, making all the right parts of her quiver back in the most confusing display of acceptance she’d ever felt over a pet name given by a virtual stranger.

  “He’s already given you a Hail-Mary pass on that count,” Grimsley continued, a little less annoyed. “I’d appreciate it if you’d stop worrying about that and start paying attention to everything else you’re doing. Yes, you’ve been thrown into a minefield of intrigue you probably wish hadn’t been here, but welcome to the club. Everyone else wishes that, too. I suspect all our precautions will come to naught. Only a fool would chase that woman to a place as crowded as this one where he has the greatest chance of being caught, but the old adage—better safe than sorry—is one by which we all prefer to operate. So we’re making the best of it, and so will you.”

  Grimsley paused, drawing another calming sigh before gesturing to the papers with his folded hand. “So, make your choice freely, knowing you won’t get fired either way. If you choose to have this settled by Master Marshall, there will be consequences. First, he’s going to file a note in your employee folder, where it will stay until the next time you do something that requires his attention. If and when you reach the end of your probationary period, it will be one of all the many things weighed and considered while the decision is made whether or not to hire you permanently.”

  She probably already had a slip in that folder. One that said she was an eavesdropper. Her shoulders sagged a little.

  “Yes,” Master Grimsley somberly added. “You likely already have a note in that file, and no, it won’t look good to have another added to it on your first day. However, the first was for a rather grievous issue; this—” he spread his hands, “—this is more along the lines of instilling in you the importance of paying attention, of being respectful, of keeping your mouth shut and playing the part to which you have been assigned during your probationary period—that of a Little Maid.”

  “I’m trying,” she protested.

  “Are you?” He frowned. “How many times have you bumped into me today? You’ve nearly knocked me over twice. How many times have you apologized when I told you I don’t want to hear it? Tell me, young lady, exactly how hard are you trying?”

  The slow burn of embarrassment accompanied his scolding, flushing through her face and into her chest. It tightened in the back of her throat, making it hard to breathe around and harder still to swallow. “I’ll do better.”

  “I know you will. Furthermore, I believe that you can, which is the only reason you are here right now. If I thought for one second that you were unteachable, I would not bother wasting my time. I would simply wait out our current dilemma and once things calm down, or you screw up again, I would move to have you either transferred into someone else’s program or dismissed.”

  Her stomach tangled into knots. She fidgeted with the folds and frills of her too-short skirt, crushing the fabric in both hands in an effort to soak up the excess moisture suddenly dampening both palms.

  “Do you want to work here?” Grimsley bluntly asked.

  She tried not to let her voice shake. “Yes. Very much.”

  “Do you understand that while the Castle is a place of fantasy for our guests, it is also a place of business? Naughty guests get spanked; as a rule, naughty employees get written up and their supervisors get tired of them very quickly.”

  Eden stared at the forms, a part of her feeling stupid. She hadn’t been trying to get in trouble so she could get spanked. It was a fantasy of hers, yes. The fact that getting to play here for free on her days off as part of the benefits package had been a huge factor in filling out the online application to begin with. And yet, instead of protesting that she wasn’t the type of person who liked making trouble anywhere, much less at work, instead, she argued with him. “You spanked Josie. I heard you through the door.”

  “Josie has been here almost a year. She is a proven submissive, who does excellent work under most circumstances and we have an employer/employee relationship in which discipline has been negotiated and agreed upon. Also, I deemed spanking to be an appropriate response to the offense she committed.”

  Her fingers fidgeted in the folds of her dress. “Y-you just said…”

  “I don’t spank every employee under my control,” Grimsley interrupted. “But I do spank Josie, and a handful of others.” He paused a moment. “I think a spanking would be appropriate for you as well. However, we do not have an established Dom/sub relationship in which my right to physically correct your behavior has been negotiated or agreed upon.”

  It was getting hard to breathe all over again, only now for a completely different reason. “How does that sort of thing happen?”

  Eden wasn’t sure she recognized the flicker that lit the depths of his hawk-brown eyes. She thought it might have been triumph, but it was there and gone again so quickly she couldn’t be sure. It might have been simple interest, too—intense, but simple. The way he kept staring at her, though, made her palms sweat hotter and her knees wobble. Did he know how often she fantasized about standing in this very position, trembling before a man willing to roll up his shirt sleeves when she misbehaved?

  Except that she hadn’t done anything wrong on purpose, and usually in her fantasies the Dom didn’t offer her a choice. He usually just grabbed her and did it, but not Grimsley. Getting up from his chair, the Master Butler came around to her side of his desk. Eden fought the urge to back away, but the trembling in her legs got so bad her knees all but knocked together.

  “I would be happy to tell you exactly how it happens.” His voice was as soft as a lover’s, but his stare was that of a wolf with a rabbit beneath his paw. He stopped in front of her, careful not to come too close, but it was too late. Every waking nerve in her body trembled at the nearness of him. The looming heat of him filled the empty air between them. She could feel it, coupled with the overwhelming wiriness of a strength she could see, but didn’t have the nerve to reach out and touch, and her own jittery anticipation of what it would be like to have him simply take her arm and bend her over his desk.

  “Is that what you want, Eden?” he asked, as if he knew exactly what she was thinking. Scared as she was, reluctant as she was, the lover-like timbre of his voice sent shivers dancing through her, especially when he said, “Do you want me to discipline you for your inappropriate behavior?”

  How could a girl not say yes to that?

  Chapter 5

  “Yes,” Eden whispered.

  Grimsley watched her mouth move while she said it and still he could not believe it.

  This was hardly a unique arrangement. Of all the Masters and Mistresses employed by the Castle, twenty-seven held supervisory positions of authority over other staff members. He knew for a fact just about all of them indulged in at least one such arrangement. Two had disciplinary arrangements with every single member of their staff, both dominants and submissives, males or females—it didn’t matter. They all signed contracts consenting to correction or they were not accepted into those Masters’ programs.

  Grimsley had enough on his plate dealing with misbehaving guests. The last thing he wanted was a house full of submissive employees confused about whether they were playing or working. He’d never get anything done.

  But over the years he had offered a limited Dominant’s role to seven of his Maids. Not one of them had evoked the same electrifying reaction that he felt zip up his back and across his shoulders when Eden offered her softly whispered consent. That zip gathered force and intoxication when she, wide-eyed and somewhat panicked, threw up a staying hand long enough to specify, “But not what you did to Josie, okay? I don’t think I could take half of that.”

  “I’ve spent ten months getting to know Josie and her limits. The discipline I gave her is tailored for her alone. You,” he said, liking the way she clutched her hands over her chest, as if she had to press to keep her heart from pound
ing through it, “you will receive what I determine you can and should take, depending on your behavior. That is my decision to make.”

  “Oh.” She was not comforted, and if she knew the images currently circulating in his imagination, she would be even less so.

  Grimsley was not a touchy-feely kind of Dom. He never had been and it showed both in the way he dispensed his discipline and in the aftercare he gave. Being an employer, it was appropriate that his submissives be required to bend over his desk. He often put the forms they had signed as a visual reminder of the control they had voluntarily relinquished inches from their noses while he plied his switch to the seat of their panty-clad bottoms. Skirts came up, but unless they were guests, bottoms were never bared. That was not appropriate in the workplace. Nor was any kind of affection once discipline was done. Grimsley was not a hugger. He did not provide a shoulder to cry on, although he had been known to provide a corner and a tissue if it was required. He did not hold his Maids on his lap, rock them or pet their hair, or whisper comforting words in their ears, but he did make sure they were out of subspace when they left his office or, as in Josie’s case, he summoned a runner and arranged for their immediate care. That was the difference between punishments delivered by an employer, as opposed to those of a lover.

  Affection was his hard limit, but it was hard, so very hard to pretend he didn’t have wayward imaginings filling his head as he began to plot out exactly what he would, or could, do to Eden. Bending her over his desk or making her touch her knees or her toes like everyone else took an abrupt turn into visions of her bent across his knee while he paddled her bottom, first with his bare hand and then perhaps with something harsher, a hairbrush maybe. Or a clothes brush—what could be more ‘butler’ than that? A clothes brush was longer, thinner than a hairbrush. The one he had was made of pale Birchwood, with a business end only two inches wide but eight inches long. It would pack a hell of a wallop, although to date he’d only ever used it on his uniform.

  “So, um…” Clearly nervous, Eden rubbed her hands against her skirted thighs and slipped a step back. “How do we start?”

  He could have reached for her. Instead, he selected one of the two forms from his desk and tapped the other. “Fill in your information, please.”

  He put the form that would have sent her straight to Marshall back in his desk, leaving her to fill out his personal program form while he turned his attention to the short table not far from the fireplace that he rarely ever lit. He did now, though. It provided better lighting than the flickering fake torches and his office did tend to run a little cool. Something that usually wasn’t noticed by those who spent their time bent over his desk, while his scepter of office plied a steady rhythm to their hind parts. When he noticed it, he put his coat back on. But for Eden, who had no coat and who would be spending significant time here, he turned the gas on and lit the fake logs.

  He took a moment to set up her table, laying out her books, a pad of paper, and assorted multi-colored pens and highlighters. He even brought her a glass and a bottle of fresh water. He got himself a pad of paper, pen, and set a chair opposite hers.

  “I don’t know how to answer the rest of this,” she eventually said, summoning him back to the desk.

  As Grimsley bent his head to look over what she’d written, he was surprised to find she’d gone well beyond what he’d intended her to fill out. Hindsight being what it was, he realized he hadn’t been as specific as he should have been. As a result, she hadn’t just filled out her personal information, but she’d gone on to fill in the portion usually reserved for himself. Under offense, she’d written: Lack of focus and Lingering where I shouldn’t. He could only assume that was as close as she wanted to come to admitting to eavesdropping. An accident, she’d called it earlier, when she’d knelt down before him with her hands clasped in pleading and her tear-filled eyes begging him for understanding.

  His cock twitched, his balls tightening.

  Grimsley made a mental note to confront her about that later. If she was having personal difficulty facing up to her misdeeds, then he would make it the last thing they discussed and he would broach it only after she was already in a place of submissive remorse, with her bottom hot and throbbing and her mind open to accept both his scolding and the self-forgiveness that came with it.

  Struggling to compose his own body’s intense reaction to that, he read on to the next line which was titled simply: Thoughts. It was where he liked to jot his personal notes on why he felt the submissive in question was acting out. Once he understood the driving force behind a Maid’s behavior, then and only then did he feel sufficiently armed with what he needed to determine her correction. It was part of his process. It was almost his ritual, but Eden had filled in this part as well. Dutifully, she’d put down her thoughts: Scared. Nervous. I’ll try to pay closer attention in future. Sad.

  He read her answer several times, surprisingly unannoyed to have his ritual disrupted. Scared—he supposed that was only natural, all things considered. So was being nervous. Her promise of future good behavior was a pleasant find, but not altogether unexpected. Submissives were known to promise anything and everything when their moment of correction came. But sad… sad stopped him.

  Grimsley sat down on the edge of his desk, facing her. Holding on to that paper, he folded his hands and studied her. “Why sad?”

  Twin spots of color flushed her cheeks. She lifted one shoulder in an unenthusiastic shrug.

  “Avoiding an answer is as good as a lie,” he said, surprisingly unannoyed by that too. Shrugs were lazy answers and they drove him crazy. “Lies erode trust and if we don’t have that, we do not have a relationship. Not of any kind. Plus, you won’t like the consequences if you lie to my face like that again. Now, why sad?”

  She huffed a soft, frustrated breath, her eyes searching the far wall as if the answer might somehow be pinned there between the stones and mortar. “Because there’s no taking it back. And, no one will ever believe me, no matter what I say.”

  Mentally, he gave her brownie points for answering his question in the most vague and unhelpful way possible. Verbally, he gave her no choice but to be more specific. “In regards to what, specifically?”

  She deflated. “I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t see the point.”

  “If I am going to be your contracted Dominant and you my contracted submissive, then you will answer any question I give you, fully and completely, whether you can see a point to it or not. Now, to what exact thing are you referring?”

  “You won’t believe me!”

  “Try me,” Grimsley countered.

  “I already did,” she snapped, then just as abruptly snapped her mouth shut and folded her arms across her chest. She was both glaring and trying not to cry when she shifted her gaze from him to the floor.

  He could see the bubbling swell of her emotions, churning right there below the surface. Her hands were clenched into fists against her arms. Her knuckles were already white. Her knees were trembling, which made the rest of her tremble too.

  “Two,” Grimsley said calmly. “I want you to remember that.”

  It was the tiniest of distractions, but it did what he needed it to. It threw her off-balance. She blinked, puzzlement bleeding into her eyes and dislodging the anger. “Two what?”

  Ignoring the question, he returned to the matter at hand. “Are you referring to earlier, when we caught you eavesdropping?”

  Her arms flapped straight out before they slapped down at her sides, her fists tight and her voice shooting up high-pitched as her frustration burst free of her control once more. “I wasn’t—” She caught herself before she actually started yelling. She tried again. “I wasn’t eavesdropping.”

  “We did catch you at the door,” he pointed out.

  She didn’t try to deny that. “I know.”

  “And you did overhear the conversation.”

  “Yes.” She didn’t deny that either, although she was quick to interject, “
But that was an accident.”

  “You accidentally eavesdropped on a conversation you had been dismissed from, in a hallway you were not supposed to be in, after having dodged the rest of your class?”

  “I wasn’t dodging. I had to go to the bathroom.”

  “In the hallway? If you’re not housebroken, that should have been on your application.”

  “No, I—damn it! I was trying to apologize!” Clapping her hands to her face, she struggled for calm. “Why do I have to make such a mess of things? I told you you wouldn’t believe me!”

  Grimsley—a man who did not like to touch, as well as a true believer in the concept that no true Dominant needed to rely on physical force in order to control his submissive—caught her by the arm before she could turn away. He caught her chin, too. “Look at me.”

  There it was again, that utter lack of guile lost in the rich blue sea of her tear-filled eyes. He could smell the soft vanilla fragrance of whatever shampoo she had used in her hair. He could almost taste the salty sweetness of the tears she was fighting not to cry. Women cried in front of him all the time, he’d never wanted to taste their tears. The mere hint of Eden’s were damn near intoxicating.

  “Apologize?” he echoed, so utterly distracted by her that he no longer knew precisely what that meant.

  Eden mistook his question for a command. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to be difficult this morning. I don’t want to be a troublemaker.”

  Her soft breath hitched as she swallowed and the first of her tears slipped free, one from each eye. His thumbs moved without his permission, catching and then caressing the wetness across both cheeks. If he didn’t, he knew he was in danger of leaning in and kissing, perhaps even licking them off her skin.

  “I don’t want you to dislike me,” she whispered. “I don’t want to lose my chance to work here. I’ll do anything to keep this job.”