by Sarah Steel
She sat at the dressing table in her bra and panties, and carefully began calculating which lipstick would be most appropriate for the working lunch ahead. As she mused, her hand toyed with small bottles of nail varnish, lining them up in a neat row. There was pale blue, pink, scarlet and a dark cherry-red… like the welts across the cheeks of a freshly caned bottom. Pale blue like the lightly bruising stroke. Pink like the stinging stripe. Scarlet like the angrier slice that stung, and cherry-red like the burn of a bamboo cane’s bite.
An orange-hued shaft of glistening waxy lipstick inched out of its faux golden sheath as she twisted the barrel. Pouting, she submitted her lower lip to the tip of the shiny stick.
No, orange was no good at all, so tossing the lipstick down petulantly she snatched a tissue and wiped her lip. She decided to go to lunch lipstick-free, unadorned, sharp and businesslike.
Back before the full-length mirror, she deftly unhooked her bra and caught the cups in her waiting palms as they fell away from her warm breasts. Then dropping the flimsy garment aside, she eased down her panties and stepped out of them, and stood before the glass naked again, gazing at her baby-oiled nipples.
What she needed was a bustier – a bustier and thong and a chic, severe trouser-suit, the black one with the thin pinstripe. No frills. And with a trouser-suit, no need for stockings or an irksome suspender belt. She smiled; suspender belts were strictly evening wear. It was so exciting to enter the bedroom after a night out on the town and have gentle hands pluck away the whispering belt, only to use it to lightly whip her bare buttocks.
No suspender belt and no stockings, and no sheer hose, either.
Once dressed again, Beatrice scrutinised the result. The bustier had a balconette uplifting effect upon her breasts, squeezing and moulding each soft, fleshy mound. Reaching down for the baby oil once more, she lightly soaked a cotton ball and dabbed it over the exposed upper slopes of her captive bosom. The attention left her cleavage gleaming healthily, and her labia pouting as her full lips kissed the stretch of the thong biting between her thighs. She then slipped on the tailored black trousers and the exquisitely cut open jacket, and black high-heeled shoes completed her immaculate appearance. Her lunchtime meeting would definitely be exciting, and she was dressed for the thrill.
Half an hour at her laptop became an hour and a quarter, perfecting the final run through. She was fact and figure faultless and poised for the pitch. She had anticipated everything they could throw at her, and intended to be in control. Being in control was her favourite position in business… although not necessarily in bed…
A taxi called for her at eleven-thirty and whisked her through Hyde Park to Mayfair, where London was ready for lunch.
It felt wrong, all wrong, from the moment she got there. And Monique, the brunette waitress Beatrice had been grooming so carefully, was off sick. An arrogant young Frenchman, Patrice, reluctantly broke away from a pair of chattering blondes he was flirting with at a window table to conduct Beatrice to a secluded, under-lit alcove, and when she requested a larger table, reserved on the phone earlier, she found herself talking to the waiter’s back.
‘I want a larger table, please,’ she repeated more loudly, and even his silence managed to contain a surly tone as she patiently explained she would need more room for her laptop and printouts. Then completely ignoring her request, he handed her the menu, upside down, and returned to the window table and his bubbly blondes.
Les Yeux Ardants filled up quickly. At the table next to hers, a couple of loud-mouthed media bitches kept Patrice on the go, but she eventually managed to flag him down and order a gin and tonic. She studied the menu. It was à la carte, with no set lunch today. Patrice shrugged indifferently and her annoyance rose. She had hoped for the option of a set lunch; her experience was that it offered an ease of ordering that always smoothed the path of an important business lunch.
Her drink arrived at last, a frosted tumbler packed high with ice. Generous slices of lime floated on the tonic, but she sniffed and scowled, the victim of an old trick still played on lone women diners; no gin in her glass, just a couple of drops of very dry sherry. An old trick practiced on her by an impudent waiter. She sipped the drink, her frown deepening at the thought of being cheated, but she decided it was better not to make a fuss, but she would watch the wine like a hawk, double check the bill and leave without tipping.
Her lunch appointment was with Cosima, her prospective clients’ MD, and her partner, Annunziata. It was a one shot chance as they were only over from Milan for the week. When her guests arrived Patrice paid little attention to them. They were ripe Italian women, thirty-something, svelte and oozing sophisticated allure, but the arrogant waiter only had eyes for the blondes chattering in their window seat and incessantly fluttering their eyelashes at him.
Beatrice led the way through the obstacles of ordering. Patrice, assuming a bored expression of benign patience, gave her little guidance and no encouragement. She chose the grilled sea bass in beurre blanc, Cosima selected a red mullet in coriander sauce, and Annunziata played safe with an order for sole braised with artichokes. Beatrice ordered the wine, a white burgundy, 1987 Chassagne-Montrachet.
The food arrived, not cold exactly, but definitely not hot, and Beatrice noticed too late that she had been served the wrong dish. She blushed as she intercepted the doubtful look exchanged by the two Italians.
‘You ask for the sea bass, no?’ Cosima queried.
‘Yes, but this monkfish is delicious,’ Beatrice fibbed, hating every mouthful. ‘The sea bass was probably disappointing. So gallant, these French boys.’
At a nearby table, the increasingly racy conversation turned to spanking, and Beatrice saw Cosima’s eyes flicker sideways, marking her deepening interest. At their table, lunch was rapidly becoming a desultory affair. Beatrice tried to sparkle, but she knew everything was perched on the brink of disaster. Even the wine – the wrong year – came too late to fully enjoy with the fish it was intended to accompany. Every little thing that could go wrong, went wrong. She was not in control. Patrice was in control with his sullen, arrogant, disrespectful indifference.
Desert was served, and Beatrice started her pitch. But before the third key performance projection was printed out, Annunziata, the accountant of the company, remarked abruptly that what they were really looking for was flair. ‘The steel hand in the velvet glove,’ she explained.
‘Someone who can get things done,’ Cosima added. ‘Someone who can make things happen.’
‘A woman in control,’ the accountant stated. ‘I need to know that when I am back in Milan, everything here in London is in capable hands.’
Beatrice’s cheeks crimsoned and she realised she was talking too fast. A mistake, and the damn table was still cluttered with the debris of the disastrous lunch. Patrice was still neglecting them, even though it was rapidly approaching tipping time, and the plates and glasses prevented her from executing the slick presentation she had planned so carefully. She paused, taking several long, slow breaths. ‘Coffee?’ she suggested.
‘I really do not think…’ Annunziata shrugged, flicking her supple wrist in pretence of consulting her watch.
Cosima, staring intently at the retreating bottoms of the two females departing from the adjoining table, did not even hear the suggestion.
‘Coffee, and brandies,’ Beatrice said desperately. ‘I insist.’
The two Italians acquiesced. She had them for another ten or so minutes. Every second counted. After waving Patrice down with amazing speed for a change, and ordering the drinks, she placed the laptop down at her feet, smoothed the white tablecloth twice with her flattened palms and launched into a word-perfect presentation. The key objectives. The core activities. The ballpark figures. Her guests politely gave her their attention, inclining their heads and listening.
Then Patrice, at long last bringing the coffee and brandies to their table, acc
identally, or otherwise, trod on the laptop. He cursed in lurid French, completely breaking the spell of her pitch.
‘I’ll speak to the maitre’d and have him reprimanded,’ Beatrice mumbled wearily as the waiter walked away without apologising.
‘Reprimanded?’ Cosima scowled. ‘I would settle for nothing less than his tears – his salt tears spilling down in contrition onto my naked breasts.’ She snarled the words contemptuously in a strident voice, and Beatrice blushed and acknowledged her own weakness in the Italian matron’s powerful scorn. And seconds later, she found herself sitting at the deserted table gazing at the vacated chairs opposite.
Patrice, insouciantly rude, presented her with the bill, but her temper finally snapping, she snatched it up from the white porcelain saucer and scrunched it into a ball, her fist working furiously. ‘I’m not paying,’ she snapped. ‘Bring me the manager.’ To which he loftily replied that the manager was busy in the kitchens.
Beatrice stood determinedly, shunting her chair back, and heads turned censoriously as Patrice blocked her way, spreading his arms and positioning himself between her and the swing doors leading to the kitchen. ‘No, madam, he is too busy for you,’ he insisted patronisingly. So she sidestepped him and stormed across the restaurant, and they burst through the swing doors together.
In the kitchen astonished faces looked up from towers of plates, chopping boards and sizzling pans.
‘Where is the maitre’d?’ she demanded, while beside her Patrice intimated she was drunk by pantomiming a flexed raised elbow, and then draining an invisible glass. Sweating staff grinned and nodded in response, and she stared back furiously at the knowing winks and sneers surrounding her. Then Patrice firmly gripped her elbow and roughly propelled her past the ovens and sinks. She slipped twice on the tiled floor and he spanked her smartly each time, winning a ragged cheer from the onlookers as he bundled her out through the back door.
In the grotty little yard outside Beatrice stood panting in indignation. The bright sunshine momentarily dazzled and disorientated her, and he seized the opportunity to prise a hand inside her jacket and maul her breasts, his lips grazing her throat and his knee pressing between her legs as he backed her against the mossy, crumbling back wall of the restaurant. ‘I take my tip now,’ he mumbled huskily against the pulse just below her ear as he found and pinched her nipple, but she summoned her wits and determination and pushed him away.
‘Bastard!’ she hissed, and kicked him twice on the shin. He cursed and raised a hand as if to slap her, but then, tossing his head back in contempt, he simply shoved her backwards.
‘Go to the rubbish, bitch,’ he said vehemently, and she squealed as she teetered on her heels, and collapsed heavily into a pile of black plastic bags, causing one of them to burst open, oozing fish guts, bloodstained cream and rotten vegetables. She struggled to get up, cringing as her hand inadvertently squelched in the mess as her heels skidded precariously in the sickening spillage. Then as she elbowed herself upright she punctured a second bag, from which rotten eggs sputtered, splashing her chin and impeccably tailored business suit.
Beatrice slumped back into the mess, and started to cry.
The hazel eyes above the lemon icing widened as the white teeth below closed over the slice of ginger cake. The eyes nearly closed in ecstasy. The pungent ginger cake was as moist in her mouth as Beatrice’s pussy had been moments before.
Andrea, the punishing prefect from Beatrice’s boarding school days and nights, and her passionately intimate companion ever since, licked a stray crumb from the corner of her mouth, and frowned. ‘Not eating?’ she queried. ‘Cherry Genoa’s scrumptious.’
Beatrice, naked and resting across some pillows on the bed, shook her head.
Swallowing a final bite of cake, Andrea brushed her fingers free of sticky crumbs, and slipping back into bed, she rested alongside Beatrice, a hand propping up her chin. Her breasts bunched softly as she deliberately crushed them into her lover’s shoulder. ‘Is something wrong?’ she asked softly.
Beatrice, sighing, shook her head despondently.
‘You haven’t touched your tea.’ They always had tea after making love in Beatrice’s bed, every Sunday afternoon.
‘Not really hungry,’ she whispered.
‘Not saying much either, are you? There is something wrong, isn’t there?’
Beatrice chewed her bottom lip anxiously. It was almost a week after the disastrous lunch and her humiliation at the hands of Patrice.
Andrea sat upright. ‘There is something, I can tell. Is it someone else?’ she asked urgently, a pang of jealous suspicion sharpening her tone, but once again, Beatrice merely shook her head morosely.
‘Tell me,’ Andrea coaxed, and Beatrice’s eyes filled with tears and brimmed over, but she remained stubbornly silent. ‘Then I’ll make you talk, like I used to,’ Andrea vowed, and ten years vanished in an instant and they were prefect and pupil once more – dominant prefect, predatory and stern; submissive pupil, vulnerable and passively helpless.
And before Beatrice could wriggle free Andrea pounced, pinning her naked body down into the soft pillows. Scissoring her legs she trapped Beatrice’s between her thighs, rendering her motionless beneath her pinioning weight. Her hands firmly gripping the struggling wrists, she bullied the breasts beneath hers with her own full bosom. ‘Tell me,’ she insisted. ‘You’ve been off with me on the phone for days. Something’s on your mind, I can tell.’
Their lips were only a warm breath apart, but Beatrice turned her face away and closed her eyes.
‘I’ll make you tell me,’ Andrea warned again. ‘And you know I can.’
Beatrice made a half-hearted bid to free herself.
‘No, my girl, none of that,’ Andrea warned, her tone mockingly severe. ‘Turn over,’ she commanded, but Beatrice shook her head defiantly. ‘I said turn over.’ Andrea let go of the supine girl’s wrists and moved off her, so she could obey, and Beatrice turned over onto her stomach, and closed her eyes.
As it was a decade ago back in boarding school, so it was now. Andrea still had the slipper she used to carry on dorm patrol. It was kept in a white cardboard box wrapped in red tissue paper, and was only brought out and used on very special occasions; birthdays – the last one brought twenty-eight strokes –Christmas and New Year’s Eve.
Andrea’s hand swept down repeatedly to spank Beatrice’s soft, creamy bottom cheeks, turning them from a stinging pink to a deepening shade of crimson. She snarled softly, confused and angered by her lover’s stubborn silence. Her resentment flared into suspicious jealousy once more, putting painful force into her punishing hand. Then she paused to survey her bare-bottomed captive. With her arms stretched out and gripping the bedstead, the curve of Beatrice’s spine was deeply pronounced. She stroked the crown of each flaming buttock in turn, drawing mews of delight from her willing victim, and then tap-tapped the shadow within which her anal rosebud remained tightly furled.
‘No,’ Beatrice wailed, desperately trying to wriggle her bottom away. ‘I’ll tell you… I’ll tell you.’ But straightening her forefinger, Andrea twisted and sank it into the heat of her lover’s anal passage. It was tight, but she forced her finger a little further.
Beatrice squealed. ‘I’ll tell you…’ she cried again. ‘I’ll tell you!’
‘Too late,’ Andrea murmured. ‘You had your chance, but you chose to cut me out of what’s going on – to make me suffer.’
‘Suffer?’ Beatrice echoed, amazed at the accusation.
‘Uncertainty. Insecurity. You made me suffer those, and now it’s your turn, my darling. Your turn to feel uncertain and insecure. Your turn to suffer.’
‘No, wait, please—’
‘I’ve waited long enough.’
‘Please,’ she wailed.
‘For what, to give you time to invent some fib? No, my darling, another even more severe spanking will
elicit the truth from you.’
‘But you don’t understand,’ Beatrice protested breathlessly. ‘I’ll tell you. Honestly, I’ll tell you everything.’
Andrea withdrew her dominant forefinger from the muscled warmth of the tight anus and contented herself with a painful pinch of an adorably fleshy buttock.
‘Everything!’ Beatrice gasped, kicking her feet into the mattress.
‘I’m sure you will, my darling, after I’ve visited your naughty bottom with my relentless spanking hand again.’ Her tone was darkening with every stern threat, her voice possessing the unmistakeable timbre of jealous anger. ‘I bet it’s all down in your filofax,’ she mused, and jumping off the bed abruptly, she hurried across the room to retrieve Beatrice’s little black notebook. And on her way back she grabbed another slice of the moist cherry Genoa.
Kneeling back on the mattress, upon which her lover remained naked and docilely stretched out gripping the headboard, Andrea sat, squashing her bottom firmly into Beatrice’s buttocks, using the submissive nude’s soft cheeks as a cushion. She sank her teeth into the cake, and through a mouthful of crumbs began reading the entries in the filofax, pausing to re-read the cryptic notes recording the business lunch at Les Yeux Ardants. ‘And who would A and C be?’ she questioned suspiciously.
Beatrice had scribbled the initials of Annunziata and Cosima below the date of the lunch, adding brief but enthusiastic details of their respective charms.
‘A and C,’ Andrea pondered, then tossed the filofax aside as she slid back slightly to straddle Beatrice’s shapely calves. She had saved the cherries from the slice of Genoa, five succulent red fruits she retrieved from the sheets they were already turning pink. She weighed them on her upturned palm, and then fingered them slowly, as she would finger Beatrice’s nipples when they were red and ripe. Then inverting her hand down over her lover’s bottom, she planted and pressed the five sticky cherries into the satin-soft skin of her tender cheeks. Lowering her face, the tip of her tongue flickering, she chivvied the cherries before capturing them one by one between her even white teeth. Two cherries remained, and Beatrice wriggled her hips, inadvertently tipping them from the crests of her buttocks into the dividing valley between.