Masters of the Castle: Witness Protection Program

by Maren Smith

  She had a submissive’s deep-seated need to please. He was pretty sure that was the reason behind her colossally poor decision, and if that was the case then she could certainly use a keeper. He was nothing if not experienced in that regard. He’d been a keeper of deep-seated submissives for years, and most of those he hadn’t even liked.

  He liked Eden, though.

  Gathering ice in a plastic baggy, he ordered himself not to think about that. There was absolutely no reason for him to like Eden. She was the kind of woman who drove him crazy, and not in a good way. She was easily distracted, unfocussed, slightly dotty, innocent, naïve, just incredibly likeable to the point that every time he got anywhere near her all he could think about was bending her over the nearest whatever and—

  He slammed the ice tray back into the fridge and shut the freezer door. Leaning both hands on the counter, he took a breath, counted to ten, and pulled himself back under control.

  He needed to get his act together. This was ridiculous.

  Gathering the ice, he walked around the cooking bar and headed into the living room, pausing for a heartbeat or two when he saw her lying on the dark cloth of his sofa. She had done exactly as he’d told her to, so he couldn’t fault her obedience. But to have her lying on her back, staring wide-eyed up at the ceiling, hands folded across her stomach, fingers nervously picking at one another—that was not what he had meant. Any other submissive in the world would have known the command he’d given her had meant face down, ass up. It almost never meant go pose yourself like Sleeping Beauty awaiting true-love’s first kiss.

  His lips tingled at the thought, and his cock tightened. So did his hands, that irresistible need to touch wakening them to her close proximity as he forced himself to near her. “Roll over.”

  Pushing herself up into a sitting position, she turned over onto her stomach. Now she lay on her belly, stiff as a board with her arms flat at her sides, fingers picking at the folds of her skirt. Whether the hem had untucked itself when she’d lain down or whether she’d done it herself, he didn’t know, but he treated it the same. Drawing a chair up to seat himself beside her, he gave her bottom a brisk slap, then flipped up the skirt and bared her again.

  “If you cannot keep your bottom bare when I ask it, I will strip you naked.”

  Her buttocks tensed, bunching together. As a means of self-protection, it wasn’t effective. All he had to do was catch one cheek, pry the crack open and dump the bag of ice directly over the little brown hole he would have preferred to be jackhammering into the sofa cushions.

  Eden came up with a shriek. “What the—Cold!”

  She grabbed at the baggy but Grimsley caught her wrist. She squeaked, her tiny feet drumming the arm of the couch, but he managed to pin her hand without difficulty behind her back. He caught her other arm too, before she decided to let that one misbehave as well. She looked damn fine with her hands pinned to the small of her back.

  “That’s cruel!” she complained, hips squirming until he gave her bottom another sharp smack. She now had matching pink handprints on the summit of each milky white nether cheek.

  “I can do a whole lot worse than ice,” he said, adjusting the bag so it was firmly pressed where it needed to be.

  “Sadist,” she whimpered, burying her face in the couch.

  He tsked. “A sadist wouldn’t care what damage was done to your body, he’d shove his cock up your ass and ride until he was sated anyway.” Picking one particular cube of ice, he shifted his touch between her legs and the piece in the bag, until he could keep one cube pressed against her anus, and then another down until it was nestled into the folds of her very wet pussy. God, the intoxication of seeing all that feminine lubrication, still fresh and dripping and begging to be licked. “Spread your legs.”

  She groaned, her flesh already breaking out into goosebumps, but grudgingly shifted her legs further apart. Her groan became a half laugh when he pushed until the plastic-wrapped cube was all but penetrating the heated furrow of her sex.

  Grimsley held it in place. It was a kindness; he would so much rather have fucked her with it, slow and deep. He could have filled his hand with as many cubes as he could hold and rubbed them all through her quivering folds. He could have splayed her open with a spreader bar forced between her ankles, hooked it to a chain from the ceiling, hoisted her until her ass was up off the couch and then, with just one small piece held between his fingers, he could have peeled the tender hood back exposing her clit and tortured her for hours as he alternated between licking and sucking her with his mouth and ‘licking’ and rolling her with ice.

  No, he wasn’t a sadist. He was fucking kind in ways she would never know about, because he had an iron will. Damn it.

  “Tell me,” he said, needing the distraction. “Why did you agree to go with that man?”

  Dragging her arms up, she covered her head with both hands, groaning again into the sofa cushion. For a moment, he thought she intended to ignore him. “I didn’t think I could say no.”

  In a place that prided itself on consent? He almost lost his temper. “Why not?”

  Lifting her head, she twisted to look back at him. Her face was a mask of the most exquisite agony and confusion. “B-because I’m an employee. Aren’t I supposed to do whatever I can to make the guests happy?”

  He stared at her, torn between the urge to drop the ice and just start spanking, and dropping the ice to comb his fingers back through her hair and reassure her. Either way, he dropped the ice and sat back, elbows on his knees, hands clasped until he knew exactly what he wanted to do. “Were you assigned to be his submissive?”

  She huffed, a sign born of frustration which she quickly stifled with a guilty glance thrown back at him. “No.”

  “Whose submissive are you?”

  She seemed to be struggling to hold his stare. Her eyes kept darting away, but they always came creeping back again, always with a little more confusion than before. “I… I don’t…”

  Grimsley slapped her bottom. It was a light blow, a glancing swat that barely skimmed the curve above her thigh. “Whose?” he demanded, threads of steel weaving through his tone. The only people allowed to have difficulty with this sort of question were those with little to no lifestyle experience. He’d read her file; he’d been up all night reading it. He knew how thoroughly she qualified as a newbie, what few experiences she’d claimed in this lifestyle were woefully inadequate. She was green as a person could be, but still… she had signed that paper last night. She had accepted his offer of protection and authority. She had submitted to him, both last night and this morning, when he’d shoved his fingers inside of her and felt every quivering tug that her impending orgasm had made.

  This was not a hard question.

  “Whose?”

  “Yours?” she blurted, but it sounded like a question. “But not really, right? I mean, it’s not really real.” He could only stare at her while she stammered, “You only did it b-because everybody thinks I’m a sneak.”

  He would not lose his temper, but only because he did have an ironclad will.

  She blinked, confusion only deepening the longer he held himself silent. “It’s true, isn’t it? Given your way, y-you’d have fired me.”

  “Yes,” he finally said, because honesty truly was the best policy in most circumstances. And because he would no sooner lie to his submissive than he would accept lies from her. Trust, in his opinion, had to be earned both ways. “But that paper I gave you to sign wasn’t just for last night. It doesn’t only apply during working hours, and it’s not something that I hang up with my coat before I go home at night. I meant every word written in that contract. It’s not a game, Eden. If you thought it was, you need to tell me that right now.”

  “I don’t know what I think this is,” she said softly.

  “It’s not a game,” he repeated.

  She shook her head, agreeing with him out of submissive duty, but that look on her face was still very much trying to figure out
what this was. He’d had years himself and yet, for all that experience, every single thing that Grimsley the impartial Dom would be doing were the girl before him absolutely anybody other than Eden… felt wrong.

  For instance, immediately dissolving the contract was what came first to his mind—the perfect solution for someone treating his dominance like a game, but that wasn’t Eden.

  Lecturing her on what she’d done wrong—he’d already done that—and continuing to lecture until she was firm in her knowledge of what she should have done differently, would have been his second choice. Except this was the Castle and the myriad of ways in which an experienced submissive could screw up were damn near endless. Not only would he be lecturing all night, but she had a long way to go before she was anything approaching experienced.

  Then there was the tried and true—punish her and send her off to bed. His bed, no less. Because that’s what she was here for, wasn’t it? She was in his apartment, lying on his couch, with her legs still spread and that bag of slowly melting ice tucked up where he so badly wanted to go, because she belonged to him. In his mind, if not in fact. In her mind too, perhaps, because if there wasn’t at least a kernel of deep-seated desire to wander in that direction, then she would not now be lying here. She would not have opened her legs to him. She would not have her face half-buried between the couch and her arms while she looked back at him with such naked pleading.

  He’d told her her misbehavior would earn an ass-fucking. Well, she wouldn’t be getting that now. Not for at least a day, and perhaps two. But that didn’t mean ‘Eden Funland’ was closed to him. Her pussy was still hot, still wet, still twitching for him. He could spend hours tonight, holding her by her hair and her neck, letting her choke on his cock until her face dripped with drool, cum and tears, and there wasn’t an ounce of sperm left to be sucked from him.

  Or he could pull her up off that couch, drag her down onto his lap and into his arms—something he had never wanted with any submissive he’d ever taken here—and hold her. Until that confusion was gone from her eyes and she went softly pliant against him.

  Grimsley got up and left the living room. He went to his bedroom where he could be alone and think without fear that she might somehow see past the fake butler act, past the mask, and read in him the violent upheaval of emotion just the thought of holding her had evoked. A job was a job. A fuck was a fuck. But holding a woman, clinging to her, body to body and heart to heart, that was vulnerability. That was intimacy.

  That risked the kind of hurt that could debilitate a man, and God knew, he’d felt that pain before. Married for seventeen years to a woman who, as far as he’d been able to tell, hadn’t practiced fidelity for the last ten or so years of their togetherness. He hadn’t known. Not only had he given her his authority, his protection, his dominance, but he’d given her the whole of his foolish heart and when the fall had come, it had hurt like hell. It had hurt so badly that, on the power of one telephone conversation with a man he’d only talked to once at a BDSM convention, he’d sold everything he owned, bought a bus ticket and moved to the middle of a cornfield in Ohio to do role-play in a fifteenth century castle that hadn’t even been built yet.

  He’d been the Master Butler ever since. The Master behind the scenes, shepherd of lost Little Maids, the damaged and the mischief-makers alike, earning his paychecks one switch stroke at a time.

  He’d also learned his lesson when it came to women. So long as he kept them at arm’s length, there was no vulnerability. There was no risk. And there was absolutely no way he could do that with Eden, he’d be a fool even to try convincing himself he could. Knowing that as strongly as he did, Grimsley also knew he should bundle her up off his couch right now, take her back to the Little Maids’ dormitory and leave her there. Before she could so innocently and unwittingly sink her clumsy claws any deeper into his already shredded soul.

  When he started moving again, it wasn’t to take her back to the dormitory. That thought was in and brutally shoved straight back out of his head almost from the moment he’d conceived of it. Any number of things could happen to Eden in the dormitory. Unmolested sleep being chief among them, but Little Maids being what they were, were incredibly fond of breaking out in the middle of the night to get into mischief. God only knew where she might end up if he actually left her alone amongst all their manipulative shenanigans.

  So that became his excuse for not doing the one thing he knew above all others to be in his best interest. He went to his closet, rummaging through what things he’d kept from the ‘old days’ and those little knickknack items he’d picked up over the years. One didn’t live one’s life in a BDSM resort without accumulating minutiae. A paddle from an old charity auction that Sam had thrust into his hands some years back, because it was the last one he had and, apparently, he couldn’t go home until they were all gone. A pair of black restraint cuffs that Kade had made for him, back when Kade was first starting to seriously get into leatherworking and he’d mistakenly assumed Grimsley had developed some attachment to an especially emotionally-needy guest—what was her name, Candace something. Sadly, the developing attraction had been all on Candace-Something’s side of the relationship. As soon as he realized what was happening, Grimsley wasted no time shuttling her over to another Dom.

  Which was exactly what he ought to do with Eden, he thought, turning those heavy leather cuffs over in his hands. He discarded them and the idea both, dumping the cuffs back into the box in which they’d been stored before continuing to rummage through the rest of it. Bundles of hemp rope, because he’d once spent hours in the quiet of his apartment, thinking he might enjoy learning the craft of knots and bondage, until he realized he really had no aptitude for it. He was simply trying to quell the loneliness.

  Where is it? he thought with a sigh. Searching behind a series of identical butler uniforms, all neatly hung side-by-side in plastic laundry bags, he found another box and pulled it out. Eureka. Tucked beneath a hat, a bag of nipple clamps and a handful of sex toys he’d confiscated from the dormitory over the years, he found a thin black collar. Unlike the velvet choker collars worn by all the other maids in his program, this one was leather, with a soft faux fur lining to protect a submissive’s delicate neck from chafing. A series of tiny silver letters spelled out ‘Naughty Girl.’

  Grimsley ran his thumb over the letters. He wasn’t particularly fond of the sentiment. While many saw such phrasing, particularly on play collars, as sexy and full of fun, he couldn’t help but see it as negative reinforcement. Particularly if worn by a submissive with already low self-esteem. What’s more, Eden wasn’t naughty. Despite everything he’d once thought at the moment of their first meeting, nothing that she had done since coming to work for him brought that particular word to his mind. To put her in a collar that effectively gave her such a label was repugnant, but it was what he had. In the morning, he supposed, if it turned out to make a difference, then he could visit the storage room and pick out something more fitting. For now, ‘Naughty Girl’ would have to do.

  Returning to the living room, he found Eden sitting up on the couch, the ice pack held limp between her hands, sniffling.

  He barely managed to stifle an exasperated sigh, something he instantly regretted when she looked up in surprise and he saw the tears.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked, a little too sharply for what he actually meant, and he regretted that too when she flinched.

  “I-I thought you left because you were mad at me. I wasn’t trying to do that.” With every word, her voice dropped further and further into hard-to-understand whispers and the tears in her eyes got bigger and shinier. “I know it doesn’t seem like it, but I really am trying very hard to do things the right way. It’s just all going so wrong!”

  She broke down right in front of him. Oddly enough, in one part of his mind he couldn’t help but compare this to every other submissive who’d dissolved into sobs in his office. Sometimes because they were manipulative bitches who thought t
ears would bend him into letting them have their way. Sometimes those tears were because the fantasy had begun to blur the lines of reality, or because emotions in moments of discipline had run too high, too fast. Sometimes it was simply because some submissives needed to cry. In every case, Grimsley would let them do it long enough to get it out of their system. It never affected him, because he always kept them at arm’s length.

  Eden affected him. From the moment her shoulders heaved and her shaky breath hitched in its first hiccupy sob, he felt the pull of her unhappiness. This wasn’t manipulation; Eden didn’t have a manipulative bone in her body. She wasn’t bawling to get something out of him. With her face flushed red with misery, she was struggling to make herself stop, but once it started rolling, like an ocean wave, there was no stopping this until it had crashed as far up the shore as it could go.

  “Eden,” he said, as calmly as he knew how. “What position are you supposed to be in?”

  Still crying, she obediently rolled back onto her stomach and lay down. She turned up her own skirt, too, and then crossed her wrists behind her back, just as they had been when he’d pinned them there. After a moment, she dug under her, pulled out the half-melted ice baggy she’d been lying on and laid it on the floor, then crossed her wrists behind her back again.

  Moving his chair up to her shoulders, Grimsley sat back down again. “What do you see?” he asked, elbows once more resting upon his knees as he showed her the collar.

  Sniffling, swallowing back her tears, in a small voice she said, “I’m not trying to be a naughty girl, either.”

  “Eden,” he said again, even softer. “When you go to bed tonight, you are going to go with a bottom so hot that you cannot sleep in any position but the one you’re in right now. Do you understand that?”