“Not so fast, Ms. O’Brien. I’m in control here,” he warned, bringing his hand down hard. A rain of hard, stinging thwacks fell rapidly all over her bottom. Ange wriggled to try to escape the deluge.
“Lie still unless you want to be tied,” he said and she could feel moisture pool in her pussy. She hadn’t realized how much she had missed dominant Jim. Automatically, she gave herself over to him, her body opening like petals in the early morning light.
Chapter Two
Mid-September. Colorado, USA.
“Wake up. We’re here, love,” Jim said, shaking his wife in the passenger seat. Some flaming map reader she had turned out to be, snoring softly for almost the entire trip. He hadn’t minded though, he knew how difficult she had found it to sleep for the last three years, he felt her toss and turn beside him nightly. He really hoped this move would finally bring her some peace. It bloody better had, because otherwise he really didn’t want to be there. It killed him to leave Ireland.
“Unh, what?” Ange muttered as she came to. “Oh, sorry, I slept the whole time.”
“It’s fine. I’m going to leave the car running and check out the house. If the beds are made up, we’ll just carry these two in and put them straight to bed, it was a great idea to put them into their pajamas at that last stop.”
It was very late when they arrived and most of the other houses were in darkness, save for the illumination of the streetlamps. The key was under a stone outside the house, just as promised. It made him laugh, they’d done the very same thing all throughout his childhood in Kerry, but you wouldn’t dream of doing it in modern day Dublin… everything would be gone when you got home from work.
The first thing that hit him as he entered was the heat. Someone had kindly thought of their arrival and the contrast to the chill of the autumn late-night air was comforting. He smiled as he had a quick glance at his surroundings. The rooms were spacious, much more so than the home they had just left. The furniture had arrived as scheduled. Most things were still wrapped in plastic or bubble wrap, but just like Brent had promised the beds were made up, ready to flop into. It was almost like Jim had gone back twenty years, back to a time when neighbors looked after each other in Ireland; before the affluence, greed and self-importance had taken over. It was a great start as far as he was concerned; helping him put his misgivings about the move into a little compartment of his brain. He returned to the car, lifted Ava and carried her inside, closely followed by Ange carrying a sleeping little Jack.
“Let’s just put them in our bed tonight, in case they get frightened. One of us can sleep with them. This way…” he directed Ange towards the master bedroom.
“Oh, nice,” she exclaimed, looking at the bed big enough to hold all of them. As she tucked their sleeping son into bed, Jim took in the room – sterile for the want of personal effects but large, comfortable and warm. He wasn’t too gone on the magnolia paint throughout the whole house but he was a dab hand with a paintbrush and that would be easily fixed. No doubt Ange would have her orders about decorating in no time. She was good at that. Five year old Ava stirred as Jim lowered her onto the bed, bringing him back into the moment.
“Are we at the new house yet, Daddy?” she asked sleepily.
“Yes, pet. You can look all around tomorrow. You’re in our bed and either Mam or I will sleep with you tonight. Do you need the bathroom?”
Ava shook her fair curly head with a little smile and settled down under the covers, too exhausted from the journey to put up a protest yet alert enough to enjoy the triumph of getting Mammy and Daddy’s bed. Jim kissed her forehead softly. He loved her dearly and when she was sleepy and biddable she almost caused his heart to ache with tenderness. Awake she was a live wire, constantly curious about the world around, which could be exhausting.
Three year old Jack hadn’t even stirred as Ange tucked him in. He looks so vulnerable, Jim thought. He never seemed to catch up size wise with his peers. And his smallness seemed to serve them both as a continual reminder of their recklessness that caused his early arrival. Jim tried not to let it get to him, but there were times he almost felt resentful of the little lad, as his arrival had been the cause of the gulf that had developed between he and Ange. And then guilt about his negative feelings led him to indulge the little monkey too much, when occasionally he really needed to be more authoritative. Everything hinged on their new home, Jim realized. He needed to reconnect with his wife and leave his guilt neatly packaged up in storage with their furniture in Dublin.
They were in a new home, with no history or scandal dogging them. And no family members coming between them, twisting the little knife that had been embedded three years ago. One or two of Ange’s family had thought he wasn’t good enough for her in the first place. He was a self-made man with no education beyond secondary school and the school of hard knocks. As a family of professional people, they had looked down their noses at him. And after the accident, it seemed he was fair game, not only a thick ignorant culchie from Kerry, but also a wife beater in their eyes. Initially, when they were still united as a couple, Ange and he had laughed at the shock they would have felt if they knew it was she, and not he who had started the playing, encouraged it. But nice professional people who were brought up properly weren’t supposed to have these perverted little tendencies. It was all right for the muck savages like him with no education or breeding. It was just the ammunition they needed. Sadly the joke had long gone out of it and Jim was well aware that they had hoped she would leave him.
He heard Ange in the master bathroom, the sound of peeing filtered out through the open door. He smiled. He loved that sound. It was the tinkle of intimacy. That she trusted him enough to pee without shutting him out. These days she generally locked the door when she used the bathroom, and he hated it, it was symbolic – she was closing him out from her private thoughts and deeds. He headed towards the door, as much to see if she would kick it shut. She smiled up from her throne. Progress. He watched her wipe her bottom, again a very private, intimate act, and she didn’t try to cover up. She was back to shaving her pussy, too, and he loved the bareness of it. He knew she did that for him, and once the spanking had stopped so too had the shaving.
“Are you tired?” she asked as she washed her hands. “Damn, no towel.” She rubbed her hands on her jeans and shrugged.
“Yes, but not too tired to open a bottle of that duty free and toast our new beginning if you’re up for it.”
“I’m really tired and the kids might wake up looking for us,” Ange excused herself.
“One glass of wine, Ange, and twenty minutes of your time, please.” It came out more like an order than a request. He didn’t know why, but carrying his point on this seemed important to him. He didn’t even care if she drank the bloody wine. He just wanted the togetherness, especially as they were going to be headed to separate beds. He saw her mouth open slightly at the sharpness of his tone, and he waited for her to bite his head off about bossing her around the place, something she always revolted against. To his surprise, she simply sighed and nodded her acceptance.
He went out to the hired car and took in their baggage. They had travelled as light as possible, having had bulkier items and many of their clothes shipped out separately. As he entered the living area, he could see that the crates had arrived. Grateful for his wife’s organizational skills he easily spotted the crate marked kitchen. He was afraid he was going to have to do his old college day trick of pushing the cork into the bottle. He opened it and managed to find a corkscrew and a couple of mugs. Uncouth, but what the hell. Ange came in and surveyed the chaos around him.
“Jim O’Brien, you’re worse than the fecking kids. Look at the mess,” she scolded, leaning down to pick things up.
“Leave them, Ange, unpacking is tomorrow.” She ignored him and he landed a sharp swat to her behind. Her eyes were ablaze as she snapped her face toward him.
Jim laughed. He loved riling her. She was the most formidably independent woman
he had ever met. He couldn’t believe it when he found out that the BDSM stuff turned her on as it was such a contrast to her spikey, tough exterior. He winked and she relaxed.
“Bastard, you always get me! Now, open that wine,” Ange said with a grin.
“You’ll probably have to watch your language, Ange. Messing aside, I don’t think they’ll go for it here. I never knew how you could swear like a trooper all the time outside class but not in it.”
“I suppose I will. Mind you, you’re not much better, and if you tell me it’s all right for a man, you know I’ll have to thwap you one. Maybe we should start a swear jar. Problem is I don’t notice it half the time.”
“I’ve a way to make you notice it: every time I catch you at it I’ll give you a good wallop. That should soon sort you out,” he said, handing her a glass. She poked her tongue out at him, not taking him seriously.
“Cheers, and welcome to our new life.”
“Cheers, Jim. Here’s to a new beginning. The house is lovely, isn’t it? It’s a pity I slept through our arrival. I didn’t get to see the neighborhood.”
“There’s always tomorrow.”
He sat beside Ange on the sofa, and she tucked her feet up and leaned in against him and talked about their plans for the next few days. That was all he had wanted. A little close, intimate contact as a promising new beginning. For that brief moment, it was Jim and Ange against the world. Just as it should be, just as it used to be, and maybe it could be again. As they rose to go to bed he even managed not to get too prickly when Ange tutted about how he left his empty mug on the coffee table and pointedly picked it up and carried it over to the sink. Rome wasn’t built in a day! If they could get the closeness back the niggling habits that had developed between them could be addressed one by one.
For the first time in a long, long while Jim O’Brien went to bed with a light heart even though he went to one of the children’s beds and Ange was tucked in beside the kids. This was a new opportunity. They had gambled and lost by taking that court case. Jim was just praying that the gamble on Colorado would have a better payoff. It better had, he was not going to give up on his family without a fight.
Chapter Three
The house was in a shambles. Before Ange had even woken up, Jim had emptied every crate in the living room not even carrying the crates to the correct room on the grounds that if everything was in the middle of the floor they couldn’t procrastinate about the unpacking. Ange was raging. She knew from experience that before it was finished there would definitely be somewhere where Jim would have to be, leaving her to sort out the chaos as he usually did. She’d yelled at him as soon as she saw it and now they were in the process of putting things where they should be in silence, Ange sulking and Jim inwardly fuming. She knew he wanted to read her the riot act but the kids were there and they tried not to argue in front of them.
After lunch as the children were napping, they were still in the middle of the cold war when the doorbell rang and Jim arrived back in the living room with three people in tow. She could have killed him for bringing anyone in to such a mess, especially one of his making. Not that there really was much choice, the whole ground floor was open plan. This was going to be challenging for her house-proud ego. In her last home, they’d had a playroom that she didn’t mind getting topsy turvy as long as the rest of the house was neat and orderly. Ange plastered a fake smile on her face, mortified to have been caught in such disarray. The smile soon became genuine though when the small, round, redhead identified herself as Maeve Harshaw, and the men as Brent Carmichael and Lelo Stephens. As far as she was concerned the only person that mattered at that moment, in that little group, was Maeve and she grasped her in an almost suffocating hug, squealing with glee.
“It’s so good to finally meet you, Maeve.” Ange’s eyes welled up as she met the woman who had helped preserve her sanity over the last year.
“Aw, you too honey,” Maeve replied as she tried to extricate herself from Ange’s grasp.
Ange took in the little group. Brent was an attractive man, blond with intelligent-looking grey eyes. She could imagine he could be pretty formidable, as he seemed to be surveying all he saw before him, weighing it up. Lelo, older and completely grey, seemed pretty intimidating, too, for a small man. Ange figured it wouldn’t do to get on the wrong side of him. Thinking about it, she should have expected to see all these stern dommy types considering the ethos of the co-op, but she hadn’t actually considered that aspect. She sure as hell hoped they realized that she wasn’t going to be bending to her husband’s rule, never mind any other man’s. She wasn’t Taken In Hand and had no intention of becoming so.
The men gave a brief run-down of the expectations the community would have of the new residents, the rules and also the benefits, but it was pretty much as they had signed in their contract. Brent handed an envelope over to Jim.
“Your signed copy, for your records,” he explained. “I wasn’t really clear about who is HOH from your application which makes it difficult to assign mentors, but I’d like to as soon as possible to help you adjust to your new environment.”
Jim and Ange spoke at once.
“I am,” said Jim.
“We don’t have one,” said Ange glaring at her husband. Who made him boss? Certainly not her! There would be wigs on the green as soon as the visitors left. She saw the men raise their eyebrows at one another.
“We don’t have a head of house relationship, we lean a little more to the BDSM side of things, but I’m the spankee, if that helps,” Ange clarified, trying to keep her tone more civil than she felt.
“Thank you, yes it does, and we’ll bear that in mind when we assign you a mentor, Jim. But Maeve has specifically requested to act as yours, Ange, even though her arrangement is a little different.”
“Thank you, Maeve. That would be really lovely,” Ange replied with real warmth.
She knew from their correspondence that they lived by different rules, but by the same token, she was aware that Maeve was an open person who would do her level best for her, and try to understand her point of view, just as she had with her daughter Sarah. They had met on a BDSM site, when Maeve was researching her daughter’s choice of lifestyle, and Ange was trying to make sense of her own choices. Ange had a lot of respect for her already.
“We’ll leave you to get on with your unpacking. Each of our telephone numbers and house numbers are in that envelope I gave you, don’t be afraid to call on us for anything. When you are ready, one of us will take you on a tour of the neighborhood, and Denver, too, if you like,” Brent said rising.
“Who elected you head?” Ange rounded on Jim as soon as the visitors were out of earshot. “You know I’m not willing to be your sub anywhere but the bedroom.”
Jim gave her a sheepish look. “Sorry, love. It just seemed like the right thing to say at the time.”
“Fuck you,” Ange muttered under her breath.
Jim heard her, there was no doubt of that; his eyes blazed with anger. But he simply picked up an armful of the children’s clothes, and walked away with a grim determined look about him and she continued working in an angry silence. So much for the new start. Once the children woke from their nap, he took them out for a walk about their new neighborhood. Ange sat and cried; with frustration at being left with the mess as per usual, annoyance at the stupid argument and general stress from the move and the upheaval her life had undergone over the last months and years. She wasn’t even sure if Corbin’s Bend was the right answer.
Looking at it in the cold light of day, she could now see it was a knee jerk reaction to having been made feel a total freak by the media in Ireland. And if she was totally honest about it, she had dragged Jim along. Perhaps she would just have been better moving to the UK with just the kids instead of dragging them all into this odd little community, based on a common ethos of spanking. Sheesh, already it was causing problems and it was their spanking kink that had gotten them into this mess in the first place.
She was stirred from her self-pity by a rap on the door. Ange contemplated not answering it as she knew she must look a fright but the rapping continued, and she wondered if Jim had forgotten his keys. Maeve came bustling in as Ange opened the door.
“Sorry to disturb you, but I wanted to catch you alone and I saw Jim out walking with the little ones, aren’t they just the cutest?”
It was only then that she actually seemed to look at Ange properly, and notice her tear stained face.
“Oh, honey, what is it?” Maeve asked, guiding her by the arm into the living room and sitting on the sofa beside her drawing Ange into her ample bosom.
“I don’t know. What if it’s all a dreadful mistake? Coming here I mean. Jim seems to think it makes him in charge, which pisses me off. We know no one. We have no jobs. We’re here and it’s completely my fault. What if we packed up our lives for nothing?” Ange sobbed.
“That’s exactly why I like being in a head of household marriage, Ange. I don’t have the burden of all the decisions. That responsibility belongs to Joe.”
“Does it not make you feel, I don’t know how to put it, maybe downtrodden?”
Maeve gave a hearty laugh as she shook her head in denial.
“It’s not like I don’t get a say, we still talk about things. It’s just Joe usually has the final say, but often I’ll talk him round. Look what happened with Sarah, he came around to her choices. If you have a good relationship, you’ll both respect each other, regardless of the dynamics. This is just the way we choose to do it.”
Exile to Unity Page 2
