by Maren Smith
When the woman did not stand up, Eden hesitated but Grimsley’s hand at the small of her back nudged her forward. She crossed the room, acutely aware of every stare that followed her until she rounded the side of the woman’s chair.
“Hello,” she offered.
“Hello,” Grace returned, but although she smiled, she didn’t look at Eden. She didn’t not look at her, either. Rather, she stared aimlessly off into space somewhere in the vicinity of Jackson’s left shoulder. She was, Eden realized with a start, blind. “I’m so sorry you got dragged into this too.” Allowing her tone to drop teasingly, she leaned somewhat in Eden’s direction before mock whispering, “I’m the reason my cousin’s resort is positively crawling with policemen.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Marshall said, in a way that suggested it wasn’t the first time he’d had to tell her that.
“So you keep saying,” Grace acknowledged. She tsked. “Wrong time. Wrong place.”
“That’s right.”
“Doesn’t change the fact that I’m being held practically against my will—”
The brooding man breathed in, briefly pinching the bridge of his nose before fixing Grace with a warning look she couldn’t possibly see.
Marshall frowned. “That is not what’s happening here and you know it.”
“Uh-oh.” Tipping her sightless eyes toward Eden, Grace offered another mock whisper that seemed less teasing now and just a little bit bitter. “That’s the tone he uses when he’s trying to talk himself out of spanking me. I’m a nuisance.”
“You are not a nuisance,” Marshall growled, frown deepened.
The brooding man rolled his shoulders. His jaw clenched again, as if he were fighting himself not to jump into the discussion with a few censuring words himself.
“Oh, but I am.” Although her tone said it didn’t bother her, a faint hardening around Grace’s eyes and mouth suggested otherwise. “I am a useless, pointless nuisance and I am doing nobody any good at all just lingering here. I want to go home.”
“As soon as this investigation is over—”
“Investigation,” Grace scoffed, cutting her cousin off. “That’s even more useless than I am. We don’t even know who we’re looking for!”
“We know—”
“His name!” she snapped. “But not what he looks like! What use is a name if we don’t know who he is! We don’t even know for sure if he’s here. I could be stuck here for years waiting for the son of a—”
“Grace,” the brooding man warned.
“—to show up,” the blind woman stubbornly finished. “Then again, maybe you could just give him a stern caning, six of the best to induce him to be a good little mafia assassin, and send him on his way.”
Not at all sure what she was supposed to be doing, Eden looked from Master Marshall to Jackson, and finally back to Grimsley. What had she just got herself into?
Giving Grimsley a nod, Marshall lowered himself onto his haunches beside his cousin, who had covered her face with her hands while she growled her frustration into them. Eden stumbled back a step, blindly led by the hand that gripped her arm. She only knew it was Master Grimsley guiding her after she’d stumbled out with him into the hallway.
“Bomb squad? Assassin?” she breathed, turning to him in shock. “What the hell is going on here?”
“Congratulations,” he said wryly. “You now know as much as any of us regarding the situation. Not to put too light a point on it, but this is what comes of listening at keyholes. Perhaps you’ll have learned your lesson?”
She almost threw her hands up, but managed to squelch the dramatics at the last frustrated second. It would do no good to protest, he wasn’t going to believe her and it would only make her look that much guiltier, anyway.
“Right, sure,” she muttered, as angry now with herself as she was at him. See if she ever apologized to anyone ever again.
The problem with getting angry when one was submissive, however, was that it tended to set off Doms disinclined to accept it.
His voice was calm, but his expression was granite hard when Grimsley closed the distance between them with a single long step. He kept his switch behind his back but she felt a tingling awareness of it, especially when he leaned over her, bringing his face right down to her level.
“Good,” he said silkily. “Then we will close the matter with the stern application of two demerits, which you may absolve yourself of at eight o’clock sharp tonight in my office.”
Demerits? What did that even mean?
She frowned, resisting the urge to back away. “May I go back to class now?”
“And run the risk you might say something you shouldn’t?” Cocking an eyebrow at her, Master Grimsley shook his head. “I think not. No, from now on, you’ll take your lessons straight from me. And you’d better believe, until this ‘mafia’ nonsense blows over, young lady, I’ll be keeping a very close eye on you.”
Chapter 3
He needed Eden in his sights twenty-four-seven like he needed a cock up his ass, and yet, from the moment he announced his intention to keep her at his side—much like an executioner pronouncing sentence on the condemned—the growing annoyance that had been itching up the back of his formal collar melted into instant calm. He was back in his element. The Master of the Little Maids, and she was just another submissive in his care.
Just another submissive who was all dressed up in the same scanty French maid uniform that didn’t cover her bottom or her breasts any better than it did anyone else’s and yet, it wasn’t very often that Grimsley found himself looking at his other Maids the way he kept stealing peeks at her. Her bottom was a proper handful. So were her breasts. And that chaos of curls atop her head—her hair was every bit as distracting as the rest of her. Earlier, he’d found it slovenly and irritating to look on. Now, however, it tickled at his Dominant’s bone. The one buried so deeply under all the constraints of his uniform that he could practically feel the inappropriateness of his temptation slithering up through the core of him. The things it whispered in his ear so seductively were all the things sexual harassment lawsuits were made of. Little things, like: he could teach her a thing or two about the consequences of peeping at keyholes; or, she’d come to entirely the wrong program if she wanted to slouch about with untidy hair; or even, as good as she looked in that skimpy outfit, she’d look even better on her knees, with her breasts hanging out, clamps biting onto each nipple and the tip of her lying tongue, her naked ass striped with lines from his switch, and her pleading blue eyes locked hungrily on his hands as he opened the fastenings of his pants.
Delicious as all that furtively felt, he refused to give in to that kind of temptation. It wasn’t like him. Grimsley was the Master Butler. Before that, he’d been a psychiatrist, having built his practice around helping victims of violence and abuse overcome their trauma. In the years he’d worked here, he’d discovered many of the Little Maids in his care came with their own deeply buried traumas. Cook Connie got the worst cases, many of them funneled through the Castle system and into her care by him. He had become an expert at recognizing the subtle (and in some cases, not so subtle) behaviors of those submissives who liked to be hurt, not for a love of the lifestyle or because they were true practitioners of the masochistic craft, but because someone in their past had taught them that to hurt was to be loved. Grimsley would not… could not be a party to furthering that kind of abuse.
He was a true practitioner. This wasn’t just a job, it was a Lifestyle and an art. Service had always been an integral part of the human social structure practically from the dawn of time, and from the dawn of time discipline had been the wheel upon which service turned. Unless they themselves were service-minded, even the newly hired submissives considered their probation in the Little Maids’ program nothing more than an ordeal to be suffered through before branching out into more interesting areas of the Castle. Eden didn’t strike him as being any different, frankly. But she had got down on her knees to him. S
he’d clasped her hands, weeping as she begged him to give her another chance.
That didn’t make her service-oriented. Although he would concede that she might have a willingness to please that he, in turn, found… faintly pleasing. His cock twitched. All right, he found it exceedingly pleasing. Already his pulse had grown heady and he had to swallow back that growing sense of restlessness. Because it wasn’t walking down the hallway that the beast inside of Grimsley ached to do right now. Not without there being some point in which he turned, grabbed Eden and shoved her up against the nearest wall, at least long enough to check if her panties were anywhere near as wet as his cock wanted them to be.
“We have a lot to do this afternoon,” Grimsley said, more to himself than to her. He really could not afford to be thinking like this or sounding this breathless with desire. “Try not to dawdle.”
“Yes, Sir.” Eden quickened her step, hands up for balance as she did her best not to slow him down or turn her ankle in heels that seemed too high for her. He gave her credit for that; she was trying. He slowed his step to make it easier for her, but after only a few minutes, in the back of his meticulous mind he couldn’t help but notice that whenever he glanced back to check her progress, her eyes were never on him, her shoes, or the path ahead. Rather, her eyes were everywhere else.
She stared at the submissive man, garbed only in a leather jockstrap and crawling on hands and knees as he was led by a leash through the grand foyer on his mistress’s way to the Media Room. She stared, wide-eyed and puzzled, at the two-person ‘unicorn’ as it came prancing down the hall past them in a white over-sized costume, complete with nipple clamps attached to the naked breasts that protruded from the two strategically cut holes in the front half of the suit, and the flowing white butt plug tail protruding from another hole cut in the back end.
The third time he glanced back, she was staring at her feet. But by then, they were heading up the grand circular staircase. That was also the moment when his own gaze became distracted. By all her… bouncing.
Cheeks flushed, biting her bottom lip in concentration, she jogged up the steps behind him in a costume designed to draw the eye. His were not immune. It was the jogging that undid him. Each step she took was an energetic hop that made the pillowy mounds of her pale breasts wobble in all the right ways. Not just her breasts, either. Her whole body was jiggling, every perfect inch of her—from the flounce of her skirt to the softness of her thighs, and the curve of her luscious backside, clad in black lace beneath a layer of white ruffles that had never been designed to cover anything.
Grimsley missed a stair. He caught himself mid-stumble, nimbly managed not to fall all the way to his knee, and was right back into his regular step with (hopefully) no one being the wiser. He told himself it was his pride that was flushed and stinging, but try though he did to focus on the remaining steps leading upward, all he could see was… bouncing.
Damn it.
Don’t look back, he told himself, growing annoyed. Just don’t look back at her. But not far from the top of the stairs, as he turned out of the main hall into a narrower secondary corridor, where the main crush of Castle guests grew thinner, the siren’s call of temptation behind him grew too strong to resist. Which was personally appalling. Grimsley had built a reputation around his ability to resist anything he damn well pleased.
Why was he having such difficulty with it now? What in God’s name was it about Eden that was driving him to such irritating distraction?
He was still trying to puzzle through it when he crossed into the Little Maids program wing. Noting the two women waiting for him on the hard bench just outside his office, he drew his keycard out of his jacket pocket and, true to form, she ran into him the second he stopped walking. For the third time. In front of other people. Fortunately, only one was a guest; the other was an employee, but both now stood witness to his very nearly being knocked over the side of the bench into their laps.
Feeling every bit as foolish as he expected he might look, and yet somehow managing to keep tight hold on his temper, Grimsley snapped around. He glared at Eden, who blushed in rosy mortification of her own. He couldn’t even chide her for it, because hadn’t he been guilty of this exact same thing not five minutes ago on the grand staircase?
“I’m sorry,” she said, backing up a step.
For reasons he dared not examine, the distance annoyed him. He immediately closed it again, stepping in so close to her that he could almost feel the heat of her radiating in the bare inches that separated them.
“I-I,” she stammered, a flush of pink rising to stain her cheeks. The color closely matched the natural shade of her lips. Against his will, his gaze was drawn to her mouth. “Sorry.”
Grimsley kept a tight rein on his instincts, but she needed to stop saying that. He could feel it, the waking interest of the darkness within unfurling as it became fixed on her. The heat of her; the pulse of her, the intensity of which he could feel growing right alongside his near overwhelming need to show her exactly what the apologies of a submissive were meant to do to her Dom.
A Dom, he mentally corrected himself. Her boss. Supervisor, really, although he supposed it all amounted to the same thing.
His hand shook to take her by the ear, leading her into his office as was his habit whenever he needed to get the immediate attention of one of his Maids. “What did I already tell you about apologizing to me?”
“Oh.” Eden’s blue eyes got huge. “I-I didn’t m-mean to say that,” she stammered. “Sorry—I mean, focus.”
“Sit down.”
He was so tempted to give her a snap of his switch as she crept past him. The two women made room for her and she quietly took her seat on the farthest end of the already occupied bench. Head bowed, she fidgeted with her fingers.
Rolling his shoulders, taking a moment to collect himself, Grimsley shut Eden from his mind long enough to focus on the job at hand. He greeted the guest first. “Bianca, what brings you to my office?”
Bianca’s real name was Shirley Thomas and she was the only maid present who wasn’t in a French maid’s outfit. A more traditional service submissive, she had opted for a longer, less revealing outfit and in all the times that she had come to the Castle to indulge her submissive side, she’d never once deliberately misbehaved, so he was surprised when she offered him the demerit slip she’d been hiding in her hand.
He read it silently. Direct insubordination. He read the slip multiple times—date, the time the infraction had occurred (almost an hour ago), the Master filing the complaint (another guest, one he didn’t know) and the signature of the security guard required to make it official.
“I see,” he said, not quite believing what he was reading.
Holding his council, he turned to the other employee. They didn’t look anything alike, but in misbehavior and in desperate need for constant supervision, Josie could have been Eden’s twin. Her evil twin, perhaps, Grimsley thought as he held his hand out for the demerit slip she was making no effort to hide. Disorderly conduct. He frowned, not at all surprised.
“We’ll take this in order of the least grievous sin.” Unlocking his office, he held the door for Bianca, who entered with her head down, her hands clasped, and her tears barely held in check.
Like most service submissives, she genuinely did not like being in trouble. She barely managed to hold herself together until he’d closed the door and then, clapping her hands to her face, she broke down wailing. “It all went so wrong so fast!”
Bianca didn’t like to be touched. He knew because he’d read her file, just like he read the files of every submissive who passed through his program. Usually he got their folders in his inbox the night before they were scheduled to arrive. His habit was to spend an hour or so before bed reviewing the particulars. After six visits, however, he pretty much knew her file by memory and that included the bright-yellow highlighted, underlined and circled note that came at the top of every admission form: No Sexual Contact. He had no idea
if she was modest, in a faithful relationship with a partner who never accompanied her to the Castle, or if she was a survivor of some past abuse; he simply honored her preference. Even when she stood emotionally breaking down in the middle of his office.
The motion sensing lights came on, the electric torches on the wall flickering to life when he walked around her and went to his desk. The only thing on top of it was his lamp and ink blotter. He slipped behind long enough to take two tissues from the bottom right-side drawer, and then returned to hand them to her.
“Thank you,” she whispered, daubing at her eyes and then her nose. A tiny gasp hitched at every indrawn breath as she struggled to calm herself. “I’m sorry.”
Funny, how that apology didn’t have the same needling effect on him that Eden’s did.
“Not at all,” he said smoothly. Retreating to sit on the edge of his desk, Grimsley folded his arms and waited. Only when her breathing was back to normal and she kept flashing him glances when she wasn’t alternately wadding and shredding her tissue between nervous fingers, did he finally say, “Would you like to tell me what happened?”
Staring at her hands, shoulders slumped, Bianca shook her head.
Drumming his fingers once upon his bicep, Grimsley corrected himself. “I apologize. That was my fault. I phrased it like a question. Let’s try this again: Tell me what happened.”
When she huffed a frustrated sigh, her shoulders slumped even more. Her eyes teared up all over again too. “It was my fault.”
He cut that off with a sharply interrupted, “The only person in this room allowed to castigate you is me. Try again.”
She ducked her head, wringing her fingers so hard and so tightly that the ends were almost purple before Grimsley hit his limit with waiting. He shoved off the desk and came after her. Her eyes got huge, but she didn’t flee or retreat so much as a single step. Her natural submissiveness overwhelmed her. She sank to her knees instead.