Masters of the Castle: Witness Protection Program

by Maren Smith

  He did, too. From first swat to last, he took her from soft gasps to earnest squeaks and muffled squeals, from gripping the chair legs to clinging to his, and before he was finished, she was bucking her hips and tossing her head, and oh how the fragrant honey of her arousal did flow. He enjoyed every bit of it, but so did she. From first swat to last. He made sure of it.

  Then he sent her to bed. He saw it on her face as the culmination of hours of anticipation and hope collapsed, but Grimsley was resolute. What’s more, when she hesitated, he didn’t just send her to bed, he cuffed her to the headboard and, because she was new and inexperienced, and because her disobedience was more a result of being stunned and hurt, he only gave her two sharp strokes of his switch before he walked out of the room and closed the door behind him.

  All she had to do was cry out her safeword, either to him or to the ever-listening microphones in every room of the Castle. She would have been heard. She didn’t, but she did cry. That was a difficult thing to listen to without dropping everything and going to her, but Grimsley made himself do it. He cleaned up the dinner dishes, straightened his kitchen and then sat down on the sofa to wait. Ostensibly, he read, but more often than not all he did was stare uncomprehendingly at the typeset on the pages of his book and listen until her sobs turned to hiccups, and the hiccups faded into quiet.

  He knew what he wanted to do tonight. She didn’t, but it wouldn’t always be her place to know. If she was going to follow his lead, then she had to learn to do what he told her to do when he told her to do it, even if she didn’t understand why at the time. And, most especially, even if she wanted him to do it differently.

  The moment things fell to silence however, was when things changed. His heart began to race, his blood to pound. He heard the creak of his bedframe, the faint clatter of her restraints as she shifted, resigning herself to another night alone and trying to find a comfortable position in which to do it. That was when he set his unread book aside. Drifting through his apartment, he turned out all the lights but for the bathroom light. He didn’t want this to happen in the dark. He wanted her to see him and to recognize that what was happening was her fantasy (and his) unfolding.

  Whether she did at first or not, he couldn’t tell. She lifted her head to look at him when he pushed open the bedroom door, but hers was neither an inviting expression nor a very submissive one. If anything, he’d have classified that look as: Yeah, great. So you’ve checked on me, now go the hell away.

  That look faded abruptly when, instead of leaving again, Grimsley came inside. He sat down at the foot of the bed to remove his shoes. As was his habit, he tucked them under the bed so they wouldn’t be tripped over in the night. The rest of his clothes, he removed all while standing beside her. Sometimes she looked at him. Most of the time, she kept her face turned away. Her fingers clenched and unclenched, and never stopped fidgeting once.

  The faint light from the distant bathroom was barely enough for him to see the tension running through her small body, but he could hear it. First in the soft catches that constricted her throat, as well as in the clinks of her restraints as she nervously alternated between gripping the bars of the headboard and clutching at the edge of the mattress. She all but squeaked when, the last of his clothes divested, folded and laid upon the chair he used for that purpose, Grimsley pulled the blanket from her tight little body. She jumped when he took a condom from his pocket and dropped it on the small of her back.

  She switched her grip to the headboard, her breathing turning fluttering—with panic, perhaps? But then, panic was as much a part of the experience as fear, wasn’t it? Reaching between her legs, he cupped her pussy, letting her know without words that he owned that part of her. He owned all parts of her, which was why he transferred his grip to the bulbous end of the plug. There was just enough lubrication remaining for him not to require more. He gave her two long, slow pumps, letting her body remember how far it had to stretch when it entered her in the first place. She mewed when he removed it altogether.

  He left the torn condom wrapper discarded on the side table next to the ginger root, wrapped in tissue; he’d dispose of it properly later. For now, he’d waited long enough. For now, there was nothing more important than Eden’s poorly stifled cries as he fit himself to her. For all that he had stretched her, she was still tight enough to make entering her a slow, luxurious lesson in hell and restraint. Heaven was the pulsing grip in which her body held him once he was fully home inside her. Her poor neglected pussy kept spasming, aching to be filled and he felt it, every tremor and every twitch.

  “No, please,” she gasped, kicking up both feet when he at last reached his limit with restraint, readily trading in those slight back and forth movements meant to give her time to adjust for the real thing. He pulled out, almost to the point of leaving her entirely, and thrust. “No!”

  Except, ‘no’ was not what she meant and it wasn’t what she wanted. In this case, ‘no’ meant ‘God, fuck, yes.’ With all the curling of her tiny toes, it meant ‘more.’ In the arching of her back and the humping of her hips as she shoved back to match his movements, it meant ‘harder, Master,’ ‘deeper, Master,’ and ‘faster… Faster… Faster!’

  He bit the nape of her neck just to hear her cry escalate in pitch and desperation. Her little bottom only bucked faster, grinding against him.

  “No!” She sobbed it, the hot little well of her body accepting him again and again. “No!”

  He bit her shoulder, suckling hard enough to leave his mark. Her uniform would not hide it. When she put her hair up in the morning, it would be there for everyone to see. The bruises he put on her ass where he grabbed her, fingers digging into her buttocks—those were for his eyes only. His territory. His submissive.

  His.

  Just his.

  He felt the tremors of her orgasm starting, the shivering spasms of her body as she fought them back.

  Seizing a handful of her hair, he yanked her head back. “Come,” he commanded, just as she arched, the tightness of her locking down upon his cock. Those shivering twitches of her body made it impossible to hold back his own. He slammed into her only twice more before his balls tightened almost to the point of pain. Pleasure ripped from him on spurting jets that bathed the condom’s tip. It was lubricant alone that came dribbling back out of her the second he withdrew, and proof of her own orgasm that bathed the lips of pussy.

  He collapsed on his back beside her, not just shaken but shaking from the intensity of coming that hard. God, it had been a long time. A long, long time.

  Her little body was still twitching, her hips still rocking ever-so-slightly to impale herself deeper on thrusts that were no longer coming. When the separation of lying beside her became too much for him, he rolled onto his side, pulling her into the cradle of his body. It had been such a long time since he’d last held a woman; Eden, he embraced all night.

  For the first time in his adult life, Grimsley slept straight through his alarm. The sun was well over the windowsill when he was awakened, not by the light shining in his eyes, but by the rattle of his pager vibrating on the bedside table. Unfolding himself from around Eden, who groaned just a little as she began to stretch, he sat up far enough to catch the pager, peered blearily at the screen and then suddenly recognized the time.

  Swearing, he let go of Eden and rolled out of bed. He found yesterday’s coat and the cellphone hidden in his jacket pocket. He made the call, fully expecting to get censured. At the very least, he expected a somewhat surprised, perhaps even concerned, “Are you all right?”

  It was the first time ever that he’d missed work. But no, Marshall did not ask that. Instead he said, “Eden isn’t in the Little Maids’ dormitory. Is she with you?”

  Startled, not sure if he should be offended, Grimsley said, “She is.”

  “The detectives need her on the third floor. Right away, please.”

  Marshall hung up.

  Grimsley stared at the cellphone in his hand a moment. H
e ought to be offended, he was pretty sure of it. But, he was also late for work and the detectives must be on to something.

  “Up,” he told Eden, flicking the bedroom light on as he walked back in to get dressed. “You’re needed.”

  There was no help for it, but that she should redress in yesterday’s uniform. He made a mental note to make room in his closet for something other than black and white butler garb and then made another to get her uniforms sent down to be cleaned. Usually Little Maids were responsible for their own laundry, but Eden wasn’t like other Little Maids. So far, if she wasn’t working, she was right by his side. Frankly, he didn’t see that changing any more than he saw himself taking time away from exploring her body so she could attend the mundane chore of washing of her own clothes.

  He had a few things in his hamper; he supposed he could lump her uniforms in with his and have them sent to the laundry together. No one was going to be scandalized to find them there. By now, someone surely had noticed that Eden hadn’t slept in her own bed since the night of her arrival. The guests probably hadn’t, but the other employees secreted in amongst them certainly would. He’d be highly surprised if there wasn’t a healthy dose of tittering and whispered speculation going on behind his back, especially this morning when neither he nor Eden showed up for the mandatory inspection.

  “We missed breakfast,” Eden said, coming out of the bathroom. Although fully covered in that skimpy French maid’s outfit, she was still struggling to do up the corset laces. The temptation to turn her around and take her straight back to bed fired in the pit of his belly and all the way down the stiffening length of his cock. With every sharp tug that pulled her laces tighter, all he could see was his own fingers jerking them loose again so he could strip her clothes away, baring her to his sight and his touch once more.

  Sure enough, that purplish red hickey he’d left on her shoulder was still quite prominent against the milky paleness of her skin. He was willing to bet he’d left a mark or two upon her bottom, where he’d gripped her ass, spreading her wide apart so he could watch the seductive pull and surrender of her flesh as he claimed her.

  “Marshall called,” he told her, before temptation got the best of him and he did something both juvenile and unsanitary. Like bend her over the dining table. “You’re to report to the third floor. The detectives are waiting for you.”

  There. The order was issued and, though her eyes widened a little at the abruptness of it, he knew Eden would obey and eventually take herself safely out of his reach.

  “Oh,” she said softly, the smooth skin between her eyebrows wrinkling as she no doubt tried to attach the wrong meaning to his command. She ducked her head, but not before he saw her gaze dip to his mouth, and then away.

  Was she waiting for a goodbye kiss?

  Grimsley recoiled. Or at least, he wanted to. His mouth had been all over her last night, but kissing the morning after was the ultimate intimacy. A relationship-oriented, no turning back sort of thing. Something that up until this point he hadn’t been tempted to experience again. And yet, for all that he knew if he did not withdraw right now, this more than any other would be the moment that haunted him later on. Instead of stepping back, it was forward that his legs tried to move him. He almost reached for her arm and then, perhaps, for her chin, tipping her mouth to meet his own, and she didn’t even have the salty-sweet draw of fresh falling tears to tempt him closer. No, the forbidden temptation was for the softness of her mouth alone.

  Yes, he almost stepped forward. But, at the very last second, Eden was the one who turned away. She laughed, probably at herself. It had that ring of ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this,’ right before she returned to the bathroom long enough to twist her golden hair into a hasty bun. She didn’t even brush it first. How anyone could look so slovenly and yet so lovely at the same time, he just didn’t know. How he could both want to spank her until she picked up a hairbrush and make love to her until every half-baked rumor that might now exist between them was pretty much set into stone—he understood that even less.

  Make love? Really?

  “I’ll hurry back when I’m done,” Eden said, just a little too brightly as she ducked past him on her way to the door.

  Her feet were still bare. He ought to take her to Wardrobe and get her some proper shoes.

  He should have kissed her.

  Like Eden, that moment was there and gone with nothing more than the soft bump of the door closing behind her. Grimsley stood in his living room, surrounded by a silence so heavy he didn’t know how he’d withstood it for all the years that he had. That silence, made all the heavier by the crisp, empty echoes of his shoes on the cold Castle stones, followed him all the way to his office.

  A mountain of tardy paperwork was waiting for him. Grimsley pulled out his pocket watch. Two minutes past noon; he’d not only missed the morning orientation, but both the check-in and check-out procedures. This, right here, was what happened when a man let himself get distracted by a woman.

  Where, he wondered, in the third-floor apartments almost directly above his office was his little Eden wandering? Her little bare feet padding silently across the floor, making even less noise than the softness of her lips would have made yielding beneath the first tender, and then hungry press of his own.

  He was hopeless. Shaking his head at himself, he was about to slip his pocket watch back into his vest when an explosion of sound and shuddering vibration, falling stone and shattering windows, shook the entire Castle. Mortar dust rained down on him from the ceiling above, proof in grey pebbles and powder all across his desk that this was not some awful daydream, but something actually happening.

  For almost ten full seconds, Grimsley sat frozen in his chair, staring at the ceiling, not at all certain it wasn’t about to collapse on him. Ten full seconds later, the fire alarm began to blare. Somewhere, in the bowels of the Castle, a woman screamed, setting off a chorus of panic that echoed through the halls, into his office and up through his legs. He was moving before he even knew where he was going.

  That explosion had come from the third floor.

  Eden was on the third floor.

  He should have kissed her when he had the chance, and now it might be too late.

  Using her master keycard to get through the heavy double doors that safeguarded the employees-only third floor staircase, Eden skipped up the stairs. She was running late and she knew it, although of all the rooms for the detectives to want to search, she’d have thought these far more secure than, say, the Roman bath or the Nursery wing. Of any place in the Castle, the Masters’ own apartments should have been safe, right? Right. Being free of concern gave her a little time in which to think. About last night—her nipples relived every tweak of his fingers and hot, hungry nip of his teeth upon them—about this morning, too.

  Should she have kissed him? Over the last two days, he’d shown in no uncertain ways that he preferred to do the leading and that she was expected to follow without hesitation. So, what would he have done if she’d followed her gut instinct and just… stepped right up into his too-highly-starched-shirt bubble, caught him by the collar so he couldn’t flinch away, and pulled his towering height right on down to her level? Just thinking about locking her lips onto his made her toes want to curl. She wasn’t sure if it would have curled his or not. More important to her in this awful hindsight moment where the solitude was starting to creep in, bringing its good ol’ buddy, Uncertainty, with it, what would he have done?

  Would he have welcomed her kiss? Like stepping into the shower with him, would it have broken through yet another unseen barrier in the unspoken minefield that this arrangement had become, or would he have stepped back, frowning in disapproval? Would an unwelcome kiss be worth a demerit or just a penalty? Would a kiss from her have truly been unwelcome?

  More than anything, she wished she could turn around and hurry right back to him so she could point-blank just ask him. No more unspoken things; she wanted to know what this… th
is was, so she wouldn’t have to feel all this horrid indecision now gnawing its way through her gut.

  Unfortunately, when she reached the top of the stairs, she spotted the two undercover detectives and their bomb-sniffing canine, Champ. Something was going on. They seemed agitated, and when Nick saw her, the tension she saw on his face instantly gave that gnawing uncertainty growing inside her teeth.

  He came down the hall, barking out in the sharpest cop voice she’d ever heard, “We’ve got to get everyone off this floor. Now!”

  At the far end of the hall, Terri was already running from door to door, banging on them and shouting for people to come out. The German shepherd, Champ, was locked nose to one door in particular, every inch of his tight body a signal that even someone inexperienced with police dogs could recognize.

  Nick clamped onto her shoulder, giving her a single hard shake that not only broken her from her immobility, but it gave the biting uncertainty inside her claws now as well as teeth. “I said, now,” he ordered, giving her a shove toward the nearest door.

  “I-I think everyone’s at work,” she said, even as she began beating on the first door she came to.

  “Double-check and hurry!” He took the opposite side of the hall from her, his big first thumping against the wood. It wasn’t until he started bellowing for whatever occupants might be inside to come out, that Eden suddenly realized—

  The dog had found a bomb.

  And just that fast, the center of the hallway exploded. More than one door burst open, the walls shattered, billowing out black smoke and sound so loud that it hit her physically, slapping her off her feet. She never even heard the dog yelp. After her head hit the wall, she didn’t hear anything at all.

  Chapter 16

  Something was burning, she could smell it—the earthy, dusty, hot and acidic smoke-smell tinged with blood. Something might have licked her feet, but then she twitched and after that, all she could feel was pain. Was that a whimper—her own or someone else’s? She couldn’t tell, because after that all she heard was the ringing of her own ears. Her head was pillowed on a rock; her body was lying on a bed of rubble. It wasn’t anywhere near as soft or as comfortable as it sounded.