by Sophia Reed
And go to the police. Or file some other complaint. Or come back with guns. There'd been enough of that. Some of the new girls can only take so much and having a huge alpha male burst in, armed and dangerous, could send some of them over the edge. The fact the edge is there is one of the delights of the lifestyle. If everyone did it, some of us (not all by a longshot) would grow bored.
The new girls, though – they panic.
"Get out!" I was shouting over the music, over the screams of one girl being birched, over the sounds of men enjoying themselves, laughing in conversational groups, one group examining one man's wife quite closely while she whimpered either with pain or desire. Or both.
I kept advancing on Scott, but he didn't back off. He didn't stop. He came forward and took my shoulders like he meant to drive me down to the floor and protect me from gunfire, or some other threat, shielding me with his body. He didn't. Instead, he stopped as he grabbed my shoulders. I didn't drop him to the floor because I wanted him in my employ and because despite the martial arts I know, attacking the man would be suicide.
And because what he was saying – "It's a raid" – had just sunk in.
And because behind him, through the open door, Annie Knox had just entered.
15
Annie
He looked beautiful. He wore a tux jacket and a bow tie over that gorgeous sculpted chest. His hair was longer than when I'd last seen it, worn brushed straight back like one of my favorite eye-candy movie stars and for the first time I realized he reminded me of Loki from the comic book movies.
For a second I didn't move, just stared as our eyes met and locked. Then I was hard on his shift command's tail, hands going up to stop Cole St. Martin from sending us away.
He was fixated on me and Scott Anderson stopped talking the second he realized I could make leeway where he couldn't.
"The police are on the access road." That's why they'd been more distant and more slow. Utilities people use those trails through the rural and empty areas when they work on remote electrical lines, but they thankfully don't tear up the desert to access their equipment. They follow easements over private property and have arrangements with the Bureau of Land Management for public lands. It meant they weren't coming directly but winding about out of sight as much as possible.
It meant we had, oh, give or take, two fucking minutes. Luxury. I spat this at St. Martín as he continued to stare at me.
Then he blinked, once, as if finally accepting I wasn't a figment of his imagination, and turned and bellowed at Chloe to turn the music down. When she turned it off, he snapped, "No! Down. Very quiet but on."
She compiled instantly while I was still staring. I would have thought she'd leave the scene completely.
That she was in charge of the stereo meant that she and Cole –
I broke off the thought because I didn't have time for it and because it absolutely couldn't matter to me, and told him as fast as I could about being in a criminal justice program, the member of my study group who was interning for the district attorney's office.
We now had probably ninety seconds. I could hear the cars, I thought, making their way to the actual unimproved driveway. Maybe that was imagination but we were almost completely out of time.
That was when Cole started shouting unnecessary instructions. Because once the music had gone down, everybody was listening. Now everybody was moving. Undressed women were put on their feet, boobs bouncing, cheeks both top and bottom flushed. The girl with the ponytail was led to the bathroom while I stared at her, the tail waving seductively from her ass.
I had to swallow several times as my irresponsible mind wondered what that would be like.
Cole buttoned his suit jacket and said calmly, "What is your story?"
Because the guests were in evening attire and I was wearing running shorts, a jog bra and a t-shirt. "My clothes still in the cell?" Or was Chloe inhabiting that as well?
He nodded. I heard car doors slam.
I ran. Before I left the main compound house I snatched a glass of red wine out of the hands of one of the guests. Then I ran, through the inner halls, not outside, and across the short stretch of desert where Cole loved to parade me naked, letting me know the guards in their hut could watch my every move. Through the inside halls and to the door that led to my cell. Cole had sent Scott after me, keys in hand, and he unlocked for me the second I got there.
I went directly to my closet and pulled out the first thing I saw, then threw it back, opting for a weird thing Cole had gotten me once that had a scoop neck and cap sleeves. It was very fitted through the bust and torso but it flared from the waist and I could throw it on over jog bra and tight biking shorts because there was no fucking way to get those off fast no matter how panicked you were.
Or maybe there's even less chance the more panicked you are. Spandex is designed to stay in place and it does its job well.
I tore my hair out of the ponytail, thinking of the other ponytail, swearing as the hair band caught in it and pulled my hair as hard as Cole ever had. I ran a brush through it and painted on lip gloss even as I heard shouting from the main part of the house.
People were being ordered to stay where they were.
Why wouldn't they? There were a group of ultra rich people celebrating god knows what in the late afternoon, early evening, wearing evening clothes and drinking wine. I pulled out another dress, a pale one that would show clearly, threw the wine onto it and watched the red stain. I threw the dress into the shower and turned the cold water on it, enough to soak it, and let it lay. That was the best I could think of for a cover story of why I was so much less coiffed than the other guests.
One last look in the mirror – I was definitely looking like I trusted in my "natural" beauty – and I was in the hall again when I heard a repeated question: "Is anyone else in the house?"
"I am," I called, padding toward the living room. I was barefoot, but so what? Essentially I was the hostess. If they were looking for a sex party and found a barefoot hostess, so what?
"Ma'am, please come out where we can see you. Please move slowly." The voice calling from the hall was clearly expending energy by not giving in to the desire to tell me to come out with my hands up.
Wouldn't be the first time. Actually, being told to come out where I could be seen and being politely called "ma'am" no matter how much I hated that term – that was a first time event.
I allowed irritation to color my voice. "I'm coming, what do you think I'm doing? Keep your hair on." Couldn't hurt. I'd been out of PD for over a year, and I'd recently quit. If they knew anything at all about me – I doubted it, James would have said something about the ex-cop turned sex scandal if there'd been any rumors – they still wouldn't know I was enrolled at UNLV. I could be the very privileged mistress of this very rich and powerful CEO.
And then after my response, I took a minute to silently blow out three big breaths, calming my racing heart. Then I stepped into view.
The two police officers, hands out like I was charging at them, other hands on the butts of their service weapons like I was going to attack at any minute, motioned for me to stop. I ignored them. My heart hammered all the harder at that. I'd never walked into a gun. I was just guessing how to act as if I owned the world. To be honest, most of the ultra rich I'd encountered so far fit in a special category of Bat Shit Crazy. Oh, well, we take our role models where we can.
"Ma'am? Please stop."
I was holding the wine glass, empty now, heading for the kitchen. I sighed, stopped in my tracks, and turned only my head to look at them. "What's going on here?"
They ignored my question. One of them was African American and the other was a shiny sunburned blond. They were both in their thirties and looked like beat cops. Uniforms. Interesting choice for a raid that they were uniform. I would have expected whatever the Las Vegas equivalent of vice was. That might mean something. A show of force if nothing else. Because a gun is a gun, and when its dead black eye is po
inted in your direction, you understand who has the power in the situation. But there's something about the police uniform that adds a certain gravitas to the story. So maybe the decision to send uniformed officers had been on purpose.
One of them gestured past me into the hall. "Is there anyone else back there?"
I raised my brows. Hell if I know. But the entrance to the pain room would be locked and accessible through a closet in my suite and an outdoor entrance I thought was probably hidden. The entrance to the maze under the compound where, for all I knew, Ariel might still be was also through a hidden door.
I looked at them levelly. "Just me."
They'd assembled all the dinner guests in the dining room where apparently nobody was hungry. A quick look around showed the girl with the tail had made some kind of hasty retreat. I wondered what she'd done with the tail. The dress she was wearing, which looked kind of glittery like a mermaid's yellow-green sequined tail belled out at the waist so absurdly she might as well have been wearing a bustle. Which made me wonder if she was still wearing the tail. Well, why not? Best way to hide it. Unless PD had reason to search her, which I doubted they did, the tail would stay unseen.
I found myself imagining what it would feel like to move with the tail secreted under my clothes, with judgmental officers so nearby, looking for anything immoral, I assumed. I bit my lip and tried to concentrate on what was actually happening.
Cole St. Martin, still wearing a tux jacket and no shirt – eccentric, but not indicative of anything illegal – was on the phone, pacing through the kitchen.
"Mr. St. Martin, sir, we need you to come out with the others."
He looked like he might hurl the phone at the serious black officer, or maybe one of the carving knives. In response, he put his phone on speaker and said, "Keith, can you hear?"
"I can hear you," said Keith, whoever that was. "As for anyone else –"
"We need you to hang up the phone," the white officer said.
"Ahh, good, yes, I can hear fine."
I took a wild guess that Keith was an attorney.
"Mr. St. Martin, hang up –"
"I heard you," he said. "This is my attorney. I have every right to have him present. He's on his way as we speak. No," he inclined his head, as if acknowledging something he'd gotten wrong. "As you speak."
Because he clearly wasn't going to.
There were no charges. I wasn't even prelaw and I could tell there weren't. I didn't know who Cole had said was the hostess so I didn't volunteer anything, but my having spilled wine on my dress and had to change explained, hopefully, my haphazard look. My being barefoot could be the same strange affectation that Cole's shirtlessness was. Maybe we were going to have wild monkey sex while the guests dined at the rather empty huge dining table where a naked girl in a halter set up and a tail didn't recline. There was no law about that, either. Etiquette might suffer but not the law.
They gathered us together in the living room. Cole's attorney was silent more than he wasn't. He did insist on hearing and seeing the warrant, which was legal and signed by a conservative judge big on nobody having any fun.
There aren't laws against consenting couples doing the things they were planning on doing here. If someone consented to be a slave and be beaten, exhibited, or forced to watch others have sex, I didn't think we still had morals charges like that.
That said, from what I'd gathered from James and just from living in Nevada under St. Martin's control – or anywhere in the U.S. – BDSM was still considered harm, no matter what the submissive said about it. Harm was not allowed. Law could be brought to bear against the person perpetrating the harm.
It made a certain kind of sense. Otherwise people wanting to engage in behavior like duels would be permitted to. In a world of open carry gun laws, there was a need for such control. I was a cop. I believed in laws.
I didn't believe in ruining someone on purpose and using the law to do it.
Prostitution would be another matter, but I was willing to bet the people here weren’t getting paid. I knew sometimes Cole picked up professionals, but not tonight. Everything here should be legal, even if consensual non-consent beatings had a weird place in the world. Even if they were technically more illegal than not.
They weren't on display anyway. What was? A dinner party of rich people in weirdly revealing dinner dress. Poor fashion sense couldn't be actionable. The fashion police were a joke, after all.
Keith knocked down every argument that something was going on that wasn't quite legal, right up until a tense moment when the police cornered the beautiful ponytail girl and demanded to see ID.
"I don't have it on me," she said, haughty and totally unafraid.
Damn. I was raised by one of the best Seattle cops of his time and I'd still have blanched under that demand.
"I'm in a private home and I didn't bring my ID with me. I didn't drive. I don't need it." She looked ethereal, pale blond, silky white skin, cupid's bow mouth done up in light pink.
"You're required to have your ID on you," one of the officers said. They were both standing too close to her, threatening.
I knew that technique, too. It made people nervous. Nervous people made mistakes.
She didn't. She said coolly, "I'm not required to have it on me."
Bluster started up and I couldn't blame them for thinking she looked under eighteen. But since there was no proof anyone was going to commit anything other than dinner party, Keith quoted the statute that meant she only had to give her name if asked. The police asked. She gave her name in a voice that said she was laughing at them. They looked her up through DMV records despite there being no laws about underage people at dinner parties. And then deflated. Miss Ponytail was a whole three months over eighteen.
The life of the party kind of died out for them then. They did a cursory search for the things in the warrant which involved drugs – Cole, the CEO of a pharmaceuticals company – had so many, neatly labeled in a sterile lab that he very loudly and pointedly didn't complain about them contaminating with their very presence, that the police abandoned that. They had a warrant for Cole and anyone who lived on the property. Which meant me if I was changing clothes there. I allowed them to search me because there was nothing for them to find. I willingly identified myself with my undercover name. Lily had served her time. She could party with rich people if they wanted her to.
They gave up. Best guess was they'd wanted something on one of the billionaires there who might be making a run at the state senate or something similar. But none of the guests could be searched. No one had done anything that could be proved.
Intent in this case was impossible to prove.
The police went away grumbling. The door shut behind them with a very solid, final sound.
16
Cole
Of course that was the highlight of the dinner party. There's no way to compete with a raid.
"Amazing timing, any longer and I might have been fucking Lucy!"
"As if!"
"Excuse me, Missy? Kneel, stress position 1, don't move."
Laughter and the slap of a hand on bare buttocks.
The pony girl was on the table again, stretched out on her stomach, her tail being tugged by a man who warned her not to let it slip out of place. Not hygienic, but none of us were there for the food.
"Cole, however did you?"
"Please believe me, Robert, it wasn't my idea."
One of the other billionaires sent his girl over to give me a blow job or to take her to the St. Andrew’s cross, or pretty much anything I wanted that didn't cause lasting harm but hurt like hell. Or didn't hurt. He was that impressed. I indulged her and her Master to the point of screaming three times, twice for screaming orgasms at the end of a riding crop and once simply screaming until she broke into sobs. I stopped then, because the anger rose too quickly.
I had enjoyed her, though. The offer came from her Master because for a few minutes, everyone with their identities, their soci
al and corporate lives on the line, had been shocked out of whatever boredom generally plagued them.
I felt it myself. The thrill of knowing my rights, of having a lawyer on speed dial who would have taken my call no matter what time of day or night or what day of the week or what major holiday. He owed me. It was through me that Keith had found the wife who was undoubtedly lying chained to the bedpost beside him. The fact that he was a damned good lawyer was just luck of the draw.
There'd been a thrill with the cops there. There'd been the game of figuring out how much we could refuse, not to mention what the holy hell they thought they were going to arrest anyone for. There'd been the moment of thinking that someone had brought an underage girl to the party, but once they ran her name through DMV and checked her driver's license, there wasn't much more for the police to do. Except leave.
In business, there's negotiation and if you're super rich and know the law where you're practicing and know what you want and where you'll compromise (nowhere) and where you won't (everywhere; why should I?) eventually it's not so thrilling.
In owning a slave, or training a sub, there's negotiation. There's knowing how hard you can push, how much you can hurt, how far you can break them down before building them back up is not healthy but mandatory, then stopping before that point. It's knowing if you can display them, expose them, humiliate them, spank and crop and birch and cane them and when they'll reach a point that no amount of signed agreements will remind them they negotiated their way into this and agreed.
How far you can push them before they walk out the door and back to Seattle and from there, to whatever college they choose.
The biggest thrill, the one that sent hot stabs of pain and delirium through me as if I were dreaming, was having Annie run into the room hard on Scott's heels. She didn't even know him. I'd replaced security completely after she left. Whatever she said to him, it got her through their protocol in time to make a huge difference.