by Maren Smith
He was going to kiss Eden. He was going to plunder her damn mouth like a Viking of old, not some strict and proper let’s-pretend Victorian butler. He was going to lock his mouth on hers even as he pushed her from his lap and rose to stand with her. He was going to back her up against the nearest wall. He was going to rip her uniform off far enough to bury his face in her breasts, filling his hands with them, before grabbing her by the ass and dragging her up the stones until she was eye to eye with him and hip to luscious hip.
“M-Master Grimsley?” Eden softly ventured.
Slapping the birch against his shin, Grimsley looked at her.
He was not calm, he suddenly realized. Nor would he be, not for a very long time.
“Run,” he told her. It was the only warning he could make himself give before that last tenuous thread of what used to be ironclad self-control snapped. He charged straight at her. “I said, run!”
Her eyes got huge. Those intoxicating blue eyes that had completely destroyed his ability to do his job practically from the moment he’d first lost himself in them. In the time it took him to close half the distance between them, she stumbled a half step back. He swished the birch, and that’s when she took off running. She could have gone anywhere, but she did what all submissives in that primal moment of panic did—she ran back down the maze of dark hallways, ducking around what few guests they encountered, and racing up the stairs all the way back to his office. To the place where, deep down in places so instinctive that she could not put them into words, she felt safe. That it was about to become a place of discipline and pain, didn’t figure into it.
She felt safe with him. Grimsley exalted in that knowledge even as he limbered up his wrist, swishing that birch in a tight circle at his side, and chased her down. He didn’t run—butlers never ran. They did powerwalk upon occasion and this was as close to that as Grimsley dared to allow.
Because they weren’t alone yet. There were people in the hallways. Not a lot. Usually only one or two guests, all of whom went about their business, but all of whom also cast puzzled glances after Eden as she went racing by… until they saw him. Then puzzled became amused, and amused turned to snickers and giggles once he shot—er, walked—powerwalked—past them.
When they rounded that last corner, he stopped when he saw the line of Little Maids waiting for him on the hard bench just outside his office. Of the four women and two men assembled, five were guests and one an employee. The employee drew his attention first. She was hunched where she sat, arms folded, twisting a lock of hair around her finger and jiggling one knee rapidly up and down. He didn’t know what she’d done, but—in her mind, at least—it must have been bad.
Eden didn’t even slow down. She shot past all of them and into his office, the door slamming shut behind her. She was back out again almost immediately.
“Sorry,” she told those waiting. “Sorry.” She shot down what little hall still remained between them, and then she vanished back inside. The door shut much more softly this time.
He’d bet his pension she was nose to the wall, ass bare and hands behind her back by the time he got there. As much as he would have loved to just send everyone off so he could attend her, he still had a job to do.
“You.” Grimsley pointed to the two men first. “Offense?”
“Laziness,” one said, somewhat chagrined.
“I was late getting back from lunch,” the other replied.
“One demerit each. Rainbow Room,” Grimsley ordered, and waved them off with his birch before stabbing the flexible tips at the next group of women. “You?”
“I called a ho a slag,” she mumbled.
The woman next to her didn’t wait to be singled out. “I’m the ho.”
The first thumbed to her. “She called me a bitch first.”
“Only after you shoved me!”
No longer looking at him, they turned on one another. Grimsley reclaimed their attention by grabbing them both by their black velvet choker-collars and hauling them to their feet.
“Two demerits in the Rainbow Room,” he said, giving each a silencing shake to quell the fighting. “Afterward, you will report to Master Dominick in the Dungeon. You will tell him your offenses as well as what transpired in the Rainbow Room. He will then decide if the slate has been washed clean. I can almost guarantee, for fighting—” he gave the shover a hard look, “—it won’t be.”
When he let them go, the young women trudged off together down the hall. Now and then, they glared at one another, but nothing more was said between them. At least not where Grimsley could hear it.
All he had to do was arch an eyebrow at the third woman and she stood up, stammering, “I-I was hoping I c-could transfer to a different program? See, I met this guy…”
“Report to Master Marshall’s office. He’ll handle the transfer for you.” He was being abrupt, he knew he was. But there was no slowing down. Just pausing long enough to deal with this fundamental aspect of his job had him gritting his teeth and slapping his own leg with the business end of that birch. Again and again, every few seconds, like the ticking of some internal clock that forced him to keep time on exactly how long was the growing delay between dealing with this minutia and finally getting Eden back within his grasp. “I hope it is more to your liking,” he said belatedly as she walked away. He was struggling to find, much less walk, that thread-thin line between what he wanted and the immaculate professionalism that, up until this point, he’d always operated by.
Although the woman glanced back, she also quickened her step and hurried on. Which left the very nervous-seeming employee, who wasn’t just eyeing him now but also biting at her thumbnail with one hand, twisting and tugging that same kinky curl with the other, and jiggling her knee violently up and down.
The old him—the pre-Eden Grimsley—would have strolled up to her, his expression calm and unreadable, the birch clasped behind his back, and simply waited for her to spill her confession. Regardless of what it was, her every reaction was crying for release from guilt. He had no contracted agreement with this woman—at the moment, he couldn’t even recall her name—but her obvious need was such that the old Grimsley would have offered her one. He’d have found a way to provide that release.
The Grimsley standing before her now saw only an obstacle between himself and Eden, waiting in his office. All he could see as he stared down at her, was shades of Eden, locked in the agony of submissive waiting.
“Offense,” he said, so clipped that the woman jumped.
For the first time she looked at him and, behind the usual submissive tears—he didn’t know her well enough to guess whether they might be genuine—he could see the very real weight of her guilt. Bowing her head again, instead of answering, she handed him a slip of paper.
A request for discipline, signed by Aaron, one of the supervising attendees over the Play program, a joint venture between the Castle and the local Humane Society. In its third year at the Castle, the program allowed any guest access to the various dogs and cats currently being fostered by the Castle. Predominantly, it was the Littles and those who identified as puppies and kittens themselves who made the most use of the Play room, where they could pick any available animal to spend an hour or a day with. Little Maids tended to spend their days flirting with Castle guests and getting into trouble. To the best of his knowledge, this was the first time one of his girls had given up mischief-making in favor of playing with puppies and getting into trouble with them.
“I’m sorry,” he said, drawing the paper closer and reading it again. “What does this say?”
Swallowing hard, the nervous maid lifted her chin far enough to confess, “I stole.”
Arching both eyebrows, he looked at her.
“Pugs,” she confessed between sniffles.
“Pugs,” he echoed.
“Th-they’re tiny little dogs with squashed up faces—” she started to explain, but he cut her off.
“I know what a pug is,” he said dryly. “Wh
ere I’m having trouble is understanding why you should feel the need to steal one.”
“Three,” she corrected sadly, her voice breaking. “I took three of them.”
God. He closed his eyes long enough to calm himself with a stabilizing breath, then opened them again. “Why?”
Fat tears rolled through her lashes, spilling down a face locked in sad confusion. “Haven’t you ever cuddled a pug before? How do you stop?”
Why did silly women keep finding their way into his program? Of any Master in this place, he had the least tolerance for dealing with it.
Drawing another deep breath, Grimsley connected the remaining conversational dots and skipped to the end. “So, you stole one.”
“Three,” she corrected again, a little impatiently herself now because he wasn’t seeming to get it. “And I didn’t take them anywhere. Not really. I just wanted to sleep with them.” She bit her bottom lip. “I got caught.”
“In the dormitory? I daresay you did.” He swished his birch, one part wondering how best to handle this, while the rest of his brain tried everything it could to conjure Eden into this woman’s place. Would it seem any less silly to him to have this conversation with Eden? No, probably not. Would he have been any less impatient or cranky? Again, probably not. What he could see, however, were three rambunctious pug puppies tumbling and playing as they trailed Eden throughout her day, completely disrupting his well-ordered Little Maids program.
Except while he might have thought the word ‘program,’ his brain conjured his office, and then his personal quarters. A grumble of pugs running after Eden as she padded barefoot into his bedroom. Gathering around her ankles to watch while she positioned herself at the foot of the bed and removed her uniform. Three soundly scolded pugs joining her in the corner, all of them with heads bowed in shame, their little bodies feeling the weight of their remorse. Eden, of course, would be the only one he switched. And they absolutely would not be allowed on his bed. He refused to wade through a huddle of sleepy puppies every time he reached for her in the middle of the night.
He slapped the birch one last time against his knee, then sighed. “Wait here.”
Turning, he took that slip of paper into his office. Eden was wringing her hands, pacing furiously up and down in front of his desk right up until she saw him. She froze mid-step, her eyes huge as she watched him come. A frightened girl would have paled, but she was flushed and her blue eyes sparkled in an easy-to-read blend of trepidation, excitement, fear and nervous energy. It was the excitement that pricked at the stirring Dom within him, waking a few cock-tightening threads of excitement of his own.
And he didn’t have time to deal with those threads, not just yet.
She stumbled back when he drew closer, but obediently bit back the surge of explanations that leapt up in her with little more than an upraised hand and a tense, “Not now,” from him.
She bit her bottom lip again and waited, watching as he took a clean sheet of paper from his desk and quickly jotted a note to Aaron. It read: I am returning her to your care until she has supplied an equal measure of labor to offset the aggravation of her puppy theft. Between the lines, he hoped Aaron got the message: Handle it your own damn self.
Folding the page, he headed for the door once more.
“Master Grimsley, can I just expla—” Eden tried again.
And again, she stopped, this time covering her mouth with both hands when he pointed at her and said, “In a moment.”
Calling to the errant Little Maid, he both returned the demerit slip into her keeping and handed her the note. “Take this back to Master Aaron. He will explain the rest and, for your sake, I’d best never see another of these from you.”
The Little Maid had eyes that got every bit as wide as Eden’s, but they were the wrong shade of blue and the intended effect was entirely lost on him. “I-I have to go back?”
“Oh yes,” he replied coolly. “Not only are you going back, but until I deem the offense repaid, you will be working under his authority. If you think my switch something to be feared, wait until you’ve sampled a measure of his strap.”
Her face paled; that right there was what a healthy measure of fear and respect looked like on a submissive—if only he had a phone, he’d take a snapshot of it to show Eden later on. Walking back into his office, he shut the door and then he locked it. Almost nobody walked in to see him unannounced. Apart from naughty Little Maids in need of correction, almost no one walked in to see him. However, Grimsley was a big believer in that old adage: There’s always a first time. He was also a believer in Murphy’s Law, which dictated that first time would happen sometime in the next few minutes, and he was determined. Nothing short of the Castle falling down around them was going to stop him now.
Chapter 11
Eden heard the door close as if it were a steel-plated bank vault. It didn’t bump softly shut against the threshold, it clanged a reverberating kong all the way through her flesh and into her soul. Her knees actually weakened beneath her. She covered her mouth with her hands just to keep from chewing straight through her bottom lip, she was so nervous.
And excited.
And scared.
But mostly excited, and she didn’t really understand why. Had she the power to do it all over again, she would have changed everything about that run in with the man by the stairs, just to avoid being here right now. And by ‘here,’ she meant in a punishment situation. This would be entirely different if they were here for the fun of it. If he was looking at her like this—with Grimsley’s face dark in its intensity and hunger, and his brown eyes smoldering in unspoken intent—he was going to hurt her. She knew that all the way down through to her core. He was absolutely going to hurt her, but he would never harm her. And therein lay the fundamental difference that kept her bare feet rooted to the floor when he dropped the birch he wielded into that canister full of canes just inside the door. It kept her rooted while he took off his butler’s jacket and hung it up behind the door. Uncuffing his white shirt sleeves, he rolled them up even as he came towards her, slowly stalking her from across the room, as if he were a lion and she a gazelle with no place else to go.
Eden shivered. Taking her hands from her mouth, she covered her stomach instead, pressing tight to keep the swarm of panicking butterflies from breaking free.
“I want to talk about what happened at the stairs,” he finally said. He was close enough now that he could have reached out and grabbed her, but he didn’t. He circled her, and every inch of her body erupted at the energy of his nearness. Every fine hair stood up on end, every electrified nerve inside her hummed, reaching for him.
Eden nodded. “I-I want to talk about it too. See…”
“Hush.” He said it softly, but Eden heard that word like a thunderous boom and shut her mouth. “I will hear your side of it, but we’re going to talk about it first. I am going to ask you some questions, and you are going to answer them. If you lie to me—”
“I won’t lie,” she whispered, shaking her head.
He stopped circling long enough to quell her with his stare. “Don’t interrupt me, either. I don’t like it.”
“I’m sorry.”
Circling the rest of the way around her, he eased himself down to sit on the edge of his desk and folded his arms. “You left my side to do what?”
A tiny kernel of icy trepidation dropped from her heart, landing in the pit of her stomach amongst all those panicking butterflies. With what had happened at the stairs, everything else that morning had completely flown from her mind.
“Oh, uh…” She rubbed her suddenly damp palms against her skirted thighs. “I was with Terri while she searched the guest rooms.”
“Did Terri invite you to come do a room search with her?” he inquired.
She rubbed her hands. “N-no, but Master Marshall said—”
“Were you invited?” he asked pointedly.
She fisted her hands in the folds of her uniform. “No, Sir.”
&nbs
p; “Did you, in fact, invite yourself?”
These were at once, the easiest questions to answer and some of the hardest.
“Yes,” she admitted.
His dark eyes bored into her. “Why did you invite yourself?”
“Because you said you were going to be upset with me if I bumped into you again.” She rubbed her legs again, then even more softly confessed, “I-I bumped into you again.”
“What did I say was going to happen if you bumped into me again?”
Prickling awareness crawled up the backs of her legs and over the curves of her bottom. When she plucked at the excess folds of her Little Maid’s skirt, she felt the soft bump and brush of cloth caressing her from behind, amplifying those prickles and making them even harder to ignore. She would have loved to laugh just then, make-believe like this all was part of some silly joke, but her throat was too tight for it and her mouth would not cooperate. And none of this felt like a joke.
He’d said he was going to sodomize her, but she wasn’t going to say that. She couldn’t. First, nobody talked like that. They said, I’m going to butt-fuck you, or maybe, I’m going to fuck you up the ass. Or, even knowing such a thing would never be classified as rape, they might say, I’m going to rape your ass, just to stress the intended punishment, brutality and force. Whether it actually played out to be brutal or not, didn’t matter. It certainly wouldn’t be forced. She had a safeword. She’d known from the moment he’d said it all those hours ago that she wasn’t going to use it.
So, no. Nobody talked that way. And second, just the thought of trying to say all that out loud was too surreal.
The longer she stayed quiet, however, ever so slightly that glint in his eyes began to change. He tipped his head expectantly. The fingers of his right hand drummed once upon the bicep of his left arm. “Did you forget the question?” he asked, in a tone that could have been mistaken as solicitous, except that she wasn’t stupid.
“No, Sir.” She swallowed hard, then lifted her chin as if the extra stretch was all her too-tight neck needed to help the words come out. “Y-you said you were going to…” God, she couldn’t. Her face burned. Her belly burned. Her entire ass was tingling as if there were a swarm of ants milling about, bringing every nerve she had to focus on that singular aspect of her anatomy.