by Maren Smith
Grimsley caught himself before his thumbs could caress another wet path through the tracks of the next tears to come trickling down her cheeks. He dragged himself back out of the impossible depths of her eyes, but trying to lock his attention back on this runaway train of conversation was like trying to wake up after days of too little sleep. Right now, it felt as if he’d been sleeping for years.
“Apologize,” he said again, striving just to drag his muddy thoughts back into focus. What was she saying? That she’d come back to apologize, only to be caught at the door and accused of snooping?
Clasping her hands, Eden dropped once more to her knees before him. Her mouth was at a level with the throbbing of his confined cock. The captivating sea of her teary eyes were locked with his.
“I am truly sorry, Master Grimsley, for the trouble I have caused. Please, is there any way we can put it behind us and start over? Please?”
And as she’d already said, she would do anything.
His cock thumped and throbbed. His pride and self-respect recoiled. There was no prize in the conquest of a woman who would do anything. That was not a woman, much less a submissive, worth having.
Grimsley let go of her. Pushing back, he moved away from her. He needed that physical separation, but no matter how many steps he took, the allure of her did not diminish. He looked at the paper in his hand, his eye going to the bottom of the form and the only question she had not answered.
Course of action.
He should put as much distance between them as possible. He should revoke his offer of dominance and keep their relationship strictly business until this nonsense with Marshall’s cousin concluded. Once the police were gone, he’d find another program to shuffle Eden into.
He could still feel her face in his hands, the coolness of her tears still drying on his thumbs, and the phantom weight of her as she lay across his knee waiting for her punishment.
He never put anyone across his knee. He never held their faces in his hands. He never desired to lick their tears.
He never desired, period.
So why did his arms now itch to wrap around Eden, pulling her in close enough so she could lay her head against his chest. While her tears absorbed into his shirt, he’d tell her all was forgiven, which was ludicrous. He’d tell her he believed her, too, and he wasn’t at all sure that he did.
He returned to the table. Pulling out the chair he’d set there for her, he snapped his fingers at the seat and Eden dutifully rose off her knees. While she came to sit where she was bid, he crossed the room to lean his hand against the fireplace mantle.
He was playing with fire, and he knew it. And still, running his finger down the line of hourglasses collected there, he selected one.
“Do you know what this is?” he asked, bringing it back to the table.
“An hourglass?” she asked, as he sat down opposite her. By her expression, he could tell she was second-guessing the simplicity of her answer, but it wasn’t a trick question. And neither was his next one.
“Do you know what it’s used for?”
She rubbed her hands under the table. “It keeps track of the time?”
“Yes, it does.” He was playing with fire. He could already feel the burn of it heating up through the crotch of his pants, searing through all the layers of cloth into his already painfully tight balls. “In a Castle without modern-day conveniences, it can sometimes be difficult to find a clock. I always have my watch, of course.” He showed her the one that lived in his vest pocket, attached to a chain that was in turn attached to his button-down vest. “Sadly, your costume does not allow for the same, which is too bad. I have often thought the effectiveness of any punishment can only be intensified by a submissive who is made aware of the passing of every second in every minute that she is forced to wait.”
He held the hourglass up for her to see. The sand was white, the wood surrounding the glass a soothing shade of brown. It wasn’t much taller than the size of his own hand and yet, she drew as far from it as the back of her chair would allow when he deliberately turned it over and set it in the middle of the table.
Eyeing the thin trickle of sand now funneling through the bottleneck, now it was Eden’s turn to ask, “What is that?”
“This is a four-hour time keeper. Four hours is what you have between now and this.” Grimsley laid the disciplinary form she had mostly filled out on the table directly in front of her.
She looked at him, her misgiving as easy to read as the shade of blue in her wary eyes. And yet, when he picked up a pen and held it out to her, she took it.
“Write this down,” he told her, pointing to the first of the empty lines beneath the words, Course of action. “Master Grimsley is going to correct me.”
The rise and fall of her breasts mounding above the low neckline of her maid’s outfit quickened as Eden obediently copied that down.
“My behavior has cost me two demerits,” Grimsley dictated for her, pausing just long enough so she could keep up. “I have also earned two additional penalties. By signing this paper, I understand that I am giving Master Grimsley consent to discipline me as he sees fit until such a time as we agree to dissolve our arrangement.”
As soon as she was done, he took both the form and the pen from her. He placed them in the center of the table, pinning the form in place beneath the weight of the hourglass as it dribbled the time away.
“You have a decision to make,” he told her, tapping the form once. “When your time is up, you will do one of two things. You will either sign this form, or you won’t. If you choose not to, you won’t be fired. You won’t be reported to Master Marshall. There will be no consequences or reprisals made against you. Our arrangement will stay as it is right now. I will be your immediate supervisor, I will treat you as nothing more than a fellow employee working in the program that I run. You will not be bullied or coerced, and I will never again extend to you my offer of dominance. That is my promise.”
Her breasts rose and fell as her breath quickened that much more. He longed to free them, to watch as the panic, trepidation and hidden tickles of nervous excitement plucked her nipples into suckable peaks.
“And if I sign it?” she asked, her shaky voice barely above a whisper.
With his finger, he directed her attention back to the answer she had just written out on the bottom of that unsigned form. “Then I am going to do this.”
He was so playing with fire…
She stared at that first line directly beneath his finger: Master Grimsley is going to correct me. It was a long time before she raised her gaze back to his, but in the depths of her wide stare, he knew that she saw the inevitable outcome of this every bit as clearly as he did.
They were both going to get burned.
Chapter 6
Master Butler Grimsley was a sadistic motherfucker. But in the four agonizingly slow hours that followed, Eden made up her mind never to tell him so. God forbid he should take such a remark and turn it into a challenge. The waiting was awful enough. She didn’t want to know how much worse he could make this.
Except that it was already going to get worse, just as soon as that pinch or two of grains finished funneling from the top glass into the pile already mounding in the bottom. She couldn’t have more than five or ten minutes and then it was either sign the form… or not.
If she signed it… oh God, if she signed it, he was going to punish her. Well, he’d said ‘correct.’ It was right there, spelled out in her own penmanship at the bottom of that form: Master Grimsley is going to correct me. She knew what that meant. Everybody knew what that meant. In the spanking videos she sometimes cruised for online and in the books she liked to read, that always meant one thing—he was going to spank her.
She’d never been spanked for punishment before. Not as a child—never as a child—and the only times it had happened as an adult, it had been for fun during sex, which amounted to little more than a couple smacks between giggles. She already knew this wasn’t go
ing to be anything like that. But, if she didn’t sign the form…
Eden couldn’t bear to follow that thought to its inevitable end. She didn’t want to not sign it. She was scared not to. For reasons she couldn’t even put her finger on, she was scared. That was strange because Grimsley had already said there would be no consequences if she chose not to do it.
But that wasn’t exactly true, was it? Oh, she believed it when he’d said he wouldn’t send her to Master Marshall. She even believed it when he said he wouldn’t fire her, but that wasn’t really the same thing as ‘no consequences,’ was it? Then again, the worst consequence she could think of was the one he had already named: He would withdraw his offer of dominance and never offer it to her again.
She’d never met this man before today, so why should that even rank as a consequence for her? For all she knew, he might be a terrible dom. Granted, he worked at the top-rated BDSM resort in the world and had for years. He was also standing in the third row in the group photo she’d seen online. The caption had declared that picture to be the one taken the day the Castle first opened its doors for business. If Grimsley had been here since the beginning, chances were good he knew his stuff. She had a feeling he was plenty safe and sane and, since he was making her sign her own doom, that said what it needed to about consensual.
There was only a tiny bit of sand still left in the hourglass.
What was she going to do?
She didn’t know.
This was killing her!
No, taking a spanking like the one he’d given Josie would kill her. Compared to that, the worst that would happen if she didn’t sign was that nothing would happen. Yes, he’d revoke whatever chance she’d ever get of receiving his authority, but who was to say she’d really want it? Maybe he sucked as a disciplinarian. Maybe he’d be too strict or, conversely, he could be inconsistent. Or maybe all he wanted was to use the excuse of being her Dom so he could get into her panties.
Except that he didn’t seem to care about her panties, one way or the other. As far as she knew, he hadn’t looked at her butt once. He likely hadn’t even noticed she had boobs. Normally, her boobs weren’t what she’d have considered noteworthy, but the corset on this thing made them look fan-freaking-tastic! And yet, so far, she’d caught him looking at his watch, glancing at the hourglass, and she’d even caught him checking on her page progress in the Castle employee manual she was supposed to be reading. According to Grimsley, the rest of her class would have taken a preliminary quiz on the material they’d been studying before adjourning for supper. That was two hours ago. It wasn’t yet eight o’clock, but it would be when her hourglass ran out. Eden had been reading this stupid book for four hours and she couldn’t recall a single word of it.
There were only a few sparse kernels of sand left to go. What was she going to do? Did she really want to sign that form? This had to be the most impetuous thing she’d ever done in her life! Was this even normal? Wasn’t this pretty much akin to walking up to a perfect stranger on the street and just handing them complete authority over her? Ultimately, eventually, maybe someday in the future when she found someone who loved her unconditionally and whom she found herself loving that way in return, maybe she would be compelled to give them that kind of control over her, but that was not this day.
Was it?
Master Grimsley was her boss and she was on probation. Technically, didn’t that already give him that kind of control over her?
In spanking videos, it did, and this was the Castle. She’d pretty well known—hell, hoped, even—right from the very beginning that some kind of… something might eventually happen to her here. But how far did she want it to go, and what if he wanted sex things?
Eden ground her bottom into the seat, fighting to stifle that pulse of arousal that thumped to life between her squeezing thighs. You don’t get a vote, she told that errant pulse, but then she made a mistake. She looked at the hourglass just as the last few grains of white trickled through the funnel, and suddenly—after four of the longest hours of her life—she was out of time. Her heart collided with her ribs.
Had he noticed yet?
On the chair across the small table from her, where he had been the entire four hours, Master Grimsley snapped his open watch shut and slipped it back into his vest pocket.
“Time,” he said, his dark eyes rising to meet hers.
Oh God, oh God, oh God… She couldn’t breathe.
“Would you like to take your CPR certification test before we settle the rest of this business?” he asked.
“Is that what I was studying?” She couldn’t even make herself look at the book lying open on the table before her. Who could think about CPR with the sands of time relentlessly spilling out in front of her?
Grimsley apparently agreed. Reaching over the unsigned form, he gathered the book, closed it, and set it aside. “After we are finished here, you may take this back with you to the Little Maids’ dormitory, review the chapters at your leisure and take the test first thing tomorrow morning.”
Good to know. Because of all the concerns tumbling through her head, chest and stomach right now, she just didn’t know what she was going to do about that stupid test.
Just breathe, Eden told herself, staring at that form and the pen waiting patiently next to the now empty hourglass.
For his part, Grimsley did not pressure her. He didn’t say anything. He just sat there, watching her from behind the unreadability of those hawk-brown eyes, waiting for her to do whatever she was going to do. And maybe that should be nothing at all, except that doing nothing felt like the worst of all her limited options. It actually made the panic inside her intensify. Her hands started to sweat, then to shake. She bit her bottom lip to the point that it hurt, but it wasn’t until he shifted in his chair that she at last could make herself move.
It was probably just a twitch, him sitting up a little straighter in an effort to make these cushionless wooden seats feel more comfortable, especially after four straight hours. But Eden saw it as him preparing to remove both his contract and her choice from the table.
She couldn’t let this go. She was crazy for what she was doing, but she just couldn’t. She lurched up out of her seat, grabbing the pen and scrawling her shaky signature across the bottom. Where the pen ended up after that, she had no idea. In her haste to get the hell away from both the form and the table, she kind of threw it.
“Oh my God, oh my God!” Shaking to get the rising tingles of excitement—or was this dread?—out of her hands, she paced the length of the entire room.
Grimsley let her do it. He stayed in his chair, watching her without a word while she expended her nervous energy from table to door, to desk and back again. On her second circling route, he stood up and met her halfway across the room.
The tingling that had engulfed her hands the second she had touched pen to form swept through all the rest of her as she came face to vest with an immoveable masculine chest. She caught her breath. He caught her by the ear, dragging her onto her tiptoes as he marched her into the nearest corner.
“Focus,” he said, the low and soothing timbre of his voice somehow calming the worst of her unruly jitters.
He left her with her nose pressed to the spot where the two stone walls met and returned to his seat at the table. She had no idea how long she stood there, listening to the rustle of the form she had signed and the subtle scratching of a pen making notes. It felt like another four hours, which only drove home just how much she hated waiting. At least until he determined that she was calm enough to proceed, or maybe he was simply tired of waiting too. Either way, she heard him stand. Heard the clatter of the chair as he picked it up, moving it out of kicking reach of the table and then set it down with all four feet securely on bare stone.
“Come here, Eden.” The creak of his chair as he sat down underlay the trembling doom she felt quivering up through her already shaky legs. It hit her pussy first, combing up through her folds with spidery fingertips be
fore seizing hold of every knot that her stomach had just twisted into.
She couldn’t take half what Josie had.
You will receive what I determine you can and should take, he’d said. Oddly, that made her feel better. But only until she turned around and saw him sitting there, the dark neat press of his uniform vest and trousers and black shiny shoes melding him with the shadows of his office at night, and the ghostly white of his shirt, with sleeves already rolled up past his forearms. He was a thin and slender man, very tall and very lean. He should not have looked as strong as he did right then to her.
“Come.” He pointed to a spot on the floor directly in front of and slightly between the points of his shiny black shoes.
She crept from hard stone floor, to red and gold area rug, and back onto hard stone floor again, stopping when she reached the spot he’d indicated. He had the most capable lap she’d probably ever seen. His hands were empty though. His switch wasn’t anywhere in sight, much less within reach.
“When it comes to disobedience, demerits and discipline—my holy trinity of Ds—I don’t usually believe in warmups. However, this is more of an introduction into what you can expect from me, as an employer and as a man who has extended to you his offer of dominance, guidance and protection.”
Her stomach twitched in the most delicious spasms. Hardly aware she was doing it, she pressed her hands flat against her abdomen in an effort to still it.
“First thing tomorrow, you and I will negotiate a proper contract and I will determine the extent of your experience, your hard and soft limits, as well as what you hope to gain from this arrangement. At that time,” he said, dark eyes holding her stare without blinking or wavering, “you will also learn what I expect of you.”
Her mind went straight to sex. Moisture spilled down through her southern folds, positively soaking the gusset of her panties. Was he going to want sex from her? Why didn’t the idea of being bent over, of receiving first the hard applications of his tools of the Castle trade and then, with her naked bottom stinging and on fire, of having to hear with trepidation the clicking of his descending zipper, scare the hell out of her? Instead, a warm liquid pulse thumped through her. She could practically feel the probing caress of his fingers as he parted her, followed by the bulbous nudge of his cock as it pressed for—
