by Maren Smith
He couldn't believe she'd licked him. Frowning down that table of blank faces, he felt another spark of what could have been irritation if only it hadn't started and stopped in his waking cock.
He couldn't believe he'd licked her back.
He couldn't believe he was still standing here when he could be—as he'd so gently put it earlier that day—breaking his bed with her.
And he really, really couldn't believe a line like that had worked on anyone, even for him, and especially not off Castle grounds.
"Someone tell me something," Dominick ordered, forcing his mind off Maddy and back onto the papers he held. He waved the packet until he had everyone's attention again. "Anything at all."
Toward the very back of the table, a tall, lanky stick of a Long John Silver in Buddy Holly black-rimmed glasses hesitantly raised his hand.
Dominick pointed. "Long johns."
Pushing his glasses up his nose, the pirate stood up. "Master Cecil, sir."
As if it were a title to be found at the bottom of a box of Cracker Jacks. As if there were a single man in this room—hell, on this island; besides him—who'd mastered anything beyond how to get his willy wet! Stifling a scowl, Dominick waited for Pirate Captain Cecil to answer the damned question.
"Um… the problem." Clearing his throat, Cecil read the offending sentence out loud. It was very short, comprised of only five words, and yet, as far as Dominick was concerned, no more important words could be found anywhere within the Island's standard operating procedures. "The Island safeword is—"
"Wait!" Dominick interrupted, holding up a staying hand. When a quick glance at the ceiling identified no obvious microphones or speakers, he turned to Emil. "Is this room plugged into Island Security yet?"
Emil laughed, then pinched the bridge of his nose, and eventually shook his head. "Nope. Not yet."
"Not yet?"
Picking imaginary flecks of lint off his sleeve, Emil shook his head. "No."
Not liking how the Island CEO was avoiding his stare, Dominick very quickly read between the lines. "Is Security wired into any part of the resort yet?"
No one at the table would meet his eyes now.
"No." Clearing his throat, Emil shook his head again. "Not yet. We, uh… we're still working on it."
Had it been any other issue, Dominick might have said something, but not over this. He remembered all too clearly the problems they'd encountered trying to get the Castle's security system working. They'd still been working on it twenty minutes before the first bus was scheduled to arrive.
"Keep working on it," was all he said before turning his attention back to Cecil. "Disaster averted. You may continue."
"Oh, um… right." Cecil stuck his nose down into his papers, found where he'd left off and started reading again. "The, uh… The Island safeword is, uh… red. It's red." Clearly puzzled, he looked up at Dominick. "I guess I don't understand where you're having a problem, sir. 'Red' is the most universally recognized safeword within the BDSM community. Everyone who comes here will know what that word means."
"Maybe that's not what my issue is," Dominick countered. "But let's explore it anyway. How do you know that?"
Cecil blinked. "I'm sorry?"
"How do you know no newbies will ever come to the Island? Did you guys just decide you were only going to cater to those people with enough experience to already know everything there is about safe, sane and consensual play? How, may I ask, are you going to screen for that?"
"We have an application process," a female pirate interrupted, sounding a little bored and a lot exasperated. She'd been fanning herself with her papers for most of the meeting. "We'll know the newbies because—"
"They'll check 'new' on their application?" Dominick finished for her, shocked that any experienced Dominant would be stupid enough to suggest such a thing. "Were you all hired off Craigslist?" Realizing it had come to a choice between laughing and losing his patience completely, he laughed. "I'm sorry, how many scene negotiations have you done again? Have you even had one?"
Sitting upright, the woman frowned. "I have eight years—"
"Eight years' experience, my ass," Dominick scoffed, pacing away from her because he knew that if he didn't, his aggravation was going to get the best of him and he might do something he'd later regret. He circled the table, snapping his fingers at Cecil, the only one out of twenty-five to arrive prepared to take notes. "Give me a piece of paper."
He snapped his fingers repeatedly until the skinny captain ripped a page out of his notepad and handed it over, along with a pen. Heading to the front of the room, Dominick slapped it up against the whiteboard, pinned it in place with a magnet, and then drew the biggest bullseye the paper could accommodate.
"Get up here," he told the woman, snapping his fingers at a spot on the floor in front of the class and unhooking the bullwhip that had hung from his belt every working day since the Castle had first opened its doors. He held it out to her and pointed at the bullseye with his other hand. "Let's see what you've learned in all your eight vast years of experience."
Slapping her papers on the table, the woman didn't move. "I don't like whips."
"You're not here for your pleasure. You're here for your client's." Dominick tossed her the whip. "Pick it up!" he ordered, when she let it fall without even trying to catch it.
"I can't use it!" she protested, her face turning red. "I've never cracked a whip in my life! I never saw the need."
"You work here now. Find the need," Dominick told everyone, then fixed his irritation back on her. "So you don't know whips; what do you know? Fire cupping? Waterboarding? Sensory play? Have you ever in your life spanked anybody?"
"My boyfriend," the woman snapped back, her face even redder.
"Good for you," Dominick congratulated, coming to the abrupt end of his patience. "Take a lap."
When she only sat there, staring at him in disbelief, he came around the table, hauling her up from the chair by her arm. "I said, take a lap." He wrenched open the conference room door and shoved her out into the hall. "Outside, once around the complex. If you pass out, you go home! And if you don't pass out, then you get your ass to whatever qualifies as a dungeon out here and you start practicing."
Her eyes flashing, she opened her mouth, but he didn't wait to hear what choice thing her wounded pride came up with to call him. He shut the door in her face.
"Every one of you is going to start practicing," Dominick said, confronting the twenty-four remaining Doms. "By the end of this week, every 'Dominant' on this island will learn how to crack a whip and hit somewhere in that bullseye four out of five times, or they are gone!" More irritated than he'd been in months, he marched back to the head of the table, barking as he went, "By the end of next week, you will all be able to hit the center bullseye at least two out of five times, or you are gone! By the time this resort opens, if you can't hit the center bullseye five out of five times and be proficient with either the single-tail whip, the signal whip, or the bull whip, than you are gone! And last but not least, by this time next year, you will not only be proficient with every whip known to man, but you will also know how to use every strap, belt, cane or crop in creation, and with unequivocal accuracy, because a Dominant who cannot hit what he's aiming at is a liability and not an asset to this business. Anyone who is that will. Be. Gone!"
"Somebody needs to tell him that pirates mutiny," a man toward the back of the room muttered. Someone else snickered. Neither did it anywhere near softly enough for him not to hear.
Turning on his heel, Dominick pointed and two men—one, a scowling native islander, and the other a nodding, smirking blond with an apparent aversion to shaving—froze.
"Name?" Dominick inquired. As calm as the roll of his irritation would allow, he snapped his fingers and gestured them both to stand. He understood he was the outsider, sent in to tell them how to do their job, but he was all done being argued with, smirked at, and ignored.
"Master Kai," the islander repl
ied, in the same sullen tone in which he'd just joked about mutinying.
"You just got yourself two laps: One for the comment, and one for claiming a title you haven't earned. The next person who calls himself 'Master' in my presence gets four, because until I see someone hit that bullseye,—" He indicated to the whiteboard. "—the only Master in this room is the one you're looking at." He glared at Kai and waited. "Well? Get your ass up here. The whip isn't going to come to you."
Puffing out an irritated sigh, Kai got up and headed for the door.
"You're not even going to try?"
"I hate whips," Kai barked over his shoulder.
"Three laps," Dominick called back. "One more for being too chickenshit to try." He turned to the blond, who was already pushing out of his chair with a rueful grimace. "Name?"
"Ma—uh…" The blond caught himself. "Rollins."
"Have you ever used a whip before?"
"Nope," he said, feigning cheerfulness as he came around to Dominick's side of the table. "I've been active in the Scene for about four years though. I'm pretty good with a cane, have been studying rope work at my friend's dojo back home, and I definitely wasn't hired off Craigslist." He paused, shrugging even as he grinned. "Is any of that going to save me from having to run laps?"
"Nope," Dominick replied in kind. "But I promise not to make you wear a nametag tomorrow that reads: 'Too Chickenshit to Try'."
Rollins blinked twice, then laughed again. "I'll take what I can get." Picking up the whip, he uncoiled the length and shook it out behind him. The braided leather made a hissing sound, undulating in serpentine waves over the beige floor tiles.
"You all might want to move," Dominick told those sitting nearby. In his opinion, only half of those who needed to actually recognized they were within striking range and got out of it. The dark-haired beauty sitting directly beside Rollins apparently thought herself above injury. Catching the scruff of her pirate's coat, Dominick pulled her from her chair and marched her, despite her protests, around to the safe side of the table. "Watch your face," he cautioned, releasing her to tug irritably at her coat and glare after him.
Rollins threw, but the whip neither cracked nor hit the whiteboard. It did, however, snap back to nick Rollins in the neck. He dropped it and clutched his throat, swearing.
"Start with a single-tail," Dominick suggested, his temper softening a bit in sympathy. He remembered that sting. He'd hit himself more than once back when he was first learning the skill. And at least Rollins had tried. "You're less apt to take your own eye out that way."
Checking his fingers for blood, Rollins clutched his neck again. "How the hell is anyone supposed to use that thing?"
Now and then, even God had to practice what he preached. Dominick came back around the table and picked up his whip. "Back up."
Chairs scooted as a much wider range of people now moved, including Rollins and the woman who wasn't irritated anymore. She had the grace to blush a little when Dominick cast a look her way. He let the length of the whip slither out behind him to its full striking potential. Eyeing his target, Dominick stepped and struck. He threw overhand, under, and snapped in at it from both sides. Five gunshot-loud cracks rent the air, each punctuated by a 'tak' as the tip punched through the paper. Absolute silence reigned once he was done. Recoiling the whip, he clipped it to his hip again.
"A year from now—" Directing everyone's attention to the target, he faced the room. "—every single one of you will be able to do that, if you practice. You'll do it with your shirts off or wearing tight clothes, and looking like Doms and Dominatrixes straight off the pages of some silly romance novel. You'll work out harder than most professional bodybuilders and you'll do it for people you've never met before, may never meet again and, at times, may not even like. Or…"
When he left that sentence to hang, Rollins, still holding his neck, finished, "Or we'll be gone."
"One lap for laughing," Dominick told him, "but if you want, you can wait until after we're done."
First nodding and then shaking his head, Rollins didn't argue, but he did retake his seat.
Dominick checked his watch. They'd been at this almost five hours now, and nothing felt accomplished. Somewhere in this compound, Maddy was waiting for him. Maybe lying on the beach in a little black number that was more string than bathing suit and sampling the Passion Honey Shandy or coconut rum Painkiller. Or, much more likely, she'd still be trapped in her hotel room with the A/C running, tapping away at her laptop as she reworked the opening line of her article, and why his imagination would fire hotter at the thought of her dressed in baggy sweats and naughty librarian glasses was beyond him.
He wondered if she'd given half as much thought as he had to what she might wear when he finally stopped by to see her.
Almost laughing, he rubbed his eyes. Yeah, he was going to see her, all right. He was going to see every blessed inch of her—sweating, sobbing, straining in her bonds beneath him, because he would have her in bonds and he would have her beneath him.
But not until he was done here. And at the rate these people were picking up each salient point he was trying to make, that might never happen.
He struggled to drag his thoughts off Maddy and get back to the lecture. That didn't get any easier until the conference room door swung quietly open and Marshall's friend, Rita, the elderly woman who'd built this place, limped in on her cane. At first glance, she did not look happy, but she took up a quiet stance against the wall, folded her hands over the head of her cane, and contented herself to wait until he was done.
Clearing his throat again, Cecil the pirate edged out of his chair and raised his hand.
"Yes?" Dominick asked, grateful for the distraction.
"You never answered the question about the safeword. Why is using 'red' a problem when everybody recognizes it as the universal word that ends a Scene?"
"Answer me this." Addressing not just Cecil but now the entire room, Dominick asked, "How many of you honestly think every customer who decides to come here is going to tell the absolute truth on his or her application? How reasonable is it to think you'll never have to worry if what they're asking you to do to them is what they really want? Do you think no one will ever change their mind mid-cane stroke? Or what about that inevitable moment when, half an hour into your intricate rope suspension scene, someone walks past your bottom wearing the same perfume her great aunt Mildred wore back when she was three years old, and dear Auntie locked her in a pitch-black closet full of rats for six hours straight? When all of a sudden your bottom freaks out, what word do you think she's going to use to signal she needs to stop?" He paused only long enough to let that sink in before he answered his own question. "She's going to cry 'red,' and then, instead of cutting her loose and going straight to comfort and appropriate aftercare, you're going to have to deal with all the hell and fury of Island Security racing down upon you.
"Red is a common safeword for a reason," he told them, including Rita now in the look with which he swept every face in that room. "Everyone recognizes it. You could have two people who speak two different languages Scening together—I don't recommend it," he paused to caution, "but you could have it—and if one called red, they'd both know exactly what it meant. Red is absolutely the word you want to negotiate using independent of Island Security, because the safeword you want to use for that has to be different, and it has to be used for emergencies only. At the Castle, our automated voice-recognition system is programmed to respond to 'onion' or 'onions', because nobody—not even if you were fisting them with shallots—would think to cry either word in the throes of happy passion. My recommendation number four: find another safeword." He shrugged. "Crustacean. Purple platypus. I really don't care, so long as it's not 'red'."
Circling to the head of the table, he picked up his discarded paper packet and checked his notes. Shit. As much as he wanted to stop, his next issue was located in the same paragraph and was practically tied to the last one. This day was never going
to end.
"One more," he said and sighed. "Then we'll call it good for the evening. Problem number five: Island Security can respond to any emergency situation, in any area of the resort, in five minutes or less. Where's my problem? Cecil, my man!" he called out, pointing before the skinny pirate could get his hand all the way up. "Take a guess."
"Five minutes is too long. Castle responds in three minutes or less." Cecil grinned.
"Correct." Dominick took his whip off his belt and held it out. "But nobody likes a know-it-all. Come on, front and center. Hit the bullseye or give me a lap."
Blinking owlishly behind the black rims of his glasses, the slender pirate pushed back his chair and came to the head of the table. As he lined himself up against the paper on the whiteboard and let the whip uncoil, a man getting out of strike-range behind him said, "Five minutes is perfectly respectable, especially for a resort this size. In fact, most people would think a response time of ten minutes or less—"
"Ten minutes is not acceptable," Dominick corrected, watching carefully as Cecil adjusted his stance.
"How the hell do you recommend getting the time down? We've spent months going over the—"
"You hire more security," Dominick told him, irritation beginning to grow all over again. "Look, there's no limit to the number of observation stations you can tuck into all the nooks and crannies of this place. So hide a few more, drill relentlessly until you know for sure there's no place on any of these islands that you can't reach within—"
"Do you know what that will cost?"
"Oh, what?" Dominick snapped, frustration rising hard and fast. "Afraid it might cut into your Christmas bonus?"
That any Dominant would be more concerned about cost than another person's safety astounded him. No, not astounded. It pissed him off.
"Oh fuck you, man," the pirate snorted. "What do you care? It's not coming out of your wallet, right?"