Her Country Master (The Dungeon Fantasy Club Book 5)

by Anya Summers

  Her Country Master

  The Dungeon Fantasy Club Book 5

  By

  Anya Summers

  © 2016 Blushing Books® and Anya Summers

  All rights reserved.

  No part of the book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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  Anya Summers

  Her Country Master

  EBook ISBN: 978-1-68259-811-5

  Cover Art by ABCD Graphics & Design

  This book is intended for adults only. Spanking and other sexual activities represented in this book are fantasies only, intended for adults. Nothing in this book should be interpreted as Blushing Books' or the author's advocating any non-consensual spanking activity or the spanking of minors.

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  Table of Contents:

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  About the Author

  EBook Offer

  Blushing Books Newsletter

  Blushing Books

  Acknowledgements

  It's hard to believe this is the fifth book in the Dungeon Fantasy Club series. It has been a very unique journey for me writing it on so many levels. I want to thank all of my fabulous readers for your enthusiasm and excitement for my books and this series; it means so much to me.

  I need to thank my awesome writers group, JW, and all the remarkable authors involved: Michele Callahan, Vanessa Vale, Cynthia Woolf, Karen Docter, and Cate Rowan, who were all present for the birth of this series and urged me to write it. Thanks ladies, I couldn't have done it without your support. I also need to thank the lovely Maren Smith for answering all the questions I've had regarding the lifestyle. Your insights have helped give me an inside peek into this world that I have hopefully translated onto the page.

  I also need to thank my agent, Donna Bagdasarian, and my stellar team at Blushing Books. Thank you for believing not only in this project but in me, your support means more to me than you will ever know.

  Chapter One

  Failure shrouded her every footstep.

  The weight of it. The inevitability of being exposed as a fraud. That, when it came down to it, Elise didn't measure up. It was unavoidable. What should have been the trip of a lifetime was instead a last ditch effort on Elise's part to keep her fledgling company afloat. When the review of her upcoming spring bridal dress line hit the stands in two weeks, Elise's company, Bridal Reflections, already struggling and on life support, would be finished. The premiere fashion critic, Vicki Shaw, had all but eviscerated Elise's latest line with her critique.

  Elise wouldn't even know about the horrid review if it weren't for the fact that Miss Shaw delighted in tanking designers' careers, and had emailed her a copy of her review that would appear in the latest Bridal Designs Magazine—January issue. Elise had two weeks before the bottom fell out in her life. Two weeks before everything she'd scrimped, saved, and bled for came to a grinding halt. Two weeks before she'd have to decide whether staying in New York was the right move on her part, or whether she'd have to leave a city she'd come to consider her home. To go where, she had no clue, back to her folks' place in Kentucky, perhaps.

  She cringed at the thought.

  There was no guidebook for how she should handle this situation. If she moved back home to Kentucky—her stomach did a loop-the-loop at the mere thought of that—her overhead costs would shrink considerably, but she would no longer be on top of the pulse of the fashion industry. There'd be other costs she'd incur for shipping her fabric and supplies a third of the way across the country instead of across the city, but after this review, she'd be lucky to have her line picked up by a department store, let alone any bridal shop.

  Oh, she smiled and put on a brave face, like she was doing now with the devilishly handsome butler, Jared, who had been sent to retrieve her at the Inverness airport. The man made her think of Braveheart with his brawny, testosterone-laden build. It made her wonder what he looked like in a kilt.

  Her latest client, the billionaire mogul, Declan McDougal, had sent his private jet to fetch her in New York. She had been hired to design the perfect custom wedding gown for his fiancée Zoey. With her company on the line, Elise knew that if she made one wrong move on her part with the McDougal wedding gown, she was toast. There
would be no coming back from it, no chance of resurrecting her career. Which was already hooked up to life support.

  Elise mumbled her thanks to Jared as he loaded her entourage of supplies into a van.

  "What's in all these bags?" Jared huffed as he loaded up box after box, trunks that were stuffed to the brim and quite heavy. She prayed it would all fit. If she needed to, she'd wait with any remaining boxes if he had to cart it to the manor in shifts.

  "Dress material." Her forced grin felt sharp upon her face, with her lips stretched almost to the point of cracking. Even to herself, her smile seemed brittle and far too forced. But she couldn't help it. Even faking it the way she was now, she couldn't seem to feel the excitement that should be there at the chance to design the wedding gown for such a mogul. This was the opportunity of a lifetime her best friend, Kara Lowe, had helped to engineer. Most people would be overjoyed at the chance, whereas all she could seem to drum up was a mild excitement. Hell, the way the butler looked, she should be down on her knees and thanking whatever god would listen for such a fine specimen of manhood being at her disposal. Granted, Kara had given Elise the scoop on the manor, the butler, and even the BDSM club located in the bowels of the place. If she weren't so stressed, she might actually be enjoying herself.

  Instead, she just felt dead inside, as though nothing and no one really fazed her. Elise had been working eighty plus hours a week for more than three years. Already suffering from major burnout, and then to have all her efforts and sacrifices boil down to a dismal failure, she had no words, no thoughts, other than despair. It had actually hurt, a sharp stabbing pain in her chest, to see Kara completely blissed out with her two men. And it made Elise feel like a horrible friend that she couldn't do more than pretend to be happy for her, when everything in Elise's life seemed to be imploding.

  Jared, bless the man, instead of leaving her at the airport with the remainder of her boxes—which weren't going to fit inside the van no matter how much rearranging he did—took it upon himself to hire an extra cab to cart all of her boxes to the manor house. When the van and cab were stuffed to the brim with her boxes and luggage, Elise grudgingly climbed shotgun into the cab with a small sigh. At least she wouldn't have to make more than small talk with the cab driver. She had a feeling the butler would have wanted more engagement from her, and this small escape was a luxury. This way, she could use the next hour to prepare herself for the manor and her first face-to-face meeting with Zoey Mills and Declan McDougal.

  In a market fraught with competition, Elise had held her own, even being crowned 'a designer to watch' in the first year of business when she'd begun her company three years ago. Elise loved creating unique wedding gowns. She was good at it, too. She knew that. So did the vast majority of her clients. Everything had been sailing along smoothly; she'd been considering expanding and taking on help to meet the increasing demands for her work. And that was when life had hit her with a double whammy.

  Last February, Elise had been hired to create a gown for one of Manhattan's elite; one Mindy Stone, when Elise and the bridezilla, who Elise was convinced had been spawned in the fiery pits of some hell dimension, had run into major creative differences. Elise refused to design the gaudy trash the bride had wanted. After multiple designs and a partial refund they parted ways, but it had not ended there, as it should have. The bridezilla had set out on a vitriolic campaign to smear Elise's reputation. And it had worked.

  Normally, Elise was made of stauncher stuff; in this industry, if you didn't have a gut full of iron, you were doomed from the start. However, thanks to Miss Stone's revenge crusade, Elise had begun losing clients left and right. It had escalated in the last two months to the point where Elise had recently spoken with an attorney about the possibility of filing a defamation lawsuit against the socialite. But because it was all hearsay, with no concrete evidence to convict the bridezilla of any wrongdoing, it would be an uphill and costly legal battle she'd likely lose in the end.

  Elise was already struggling to pay her bills as it was because of the downturn in her sales. The terrifying part of it, which kept her from sleeping through the night—or getting any sleep at all for that matter if things didn't turn around fast—was that Elise had three months before she ran out of savings and would have to close up shop. This was why, when her best friend, Kara, had tossed her name into contention to design the billionaire mogul Declan McDougal's fiancée's gown, she had all but thrown herself at the project with every shred of creative genius still left in her fingers. Except Elise didn't know if it would be enough, if she would be enough, to make this one gown change the downward spiral of her fate.

  Elise popped another Tums in her mouth. She'd taken to chewing on them like some people chewed gum. It was the only way she could combat the roiling acidic nerves in her stomach that had taken up residence in her body. She'd lost weight because of it. So basically she was sleep deprived and starving, her hip bones were starting to show, and her clothes hung off of her to the point where her doctor had run some bloodwork to make sure she wasn't ill.

  She hadn't told Kara about the smear campaign. She was too embarrassed about it and had tried to hide it. Considering they swam in the same professional circles, hiding it from Kara had become a job in and of itself. Ridiculous, Elise knew. Kara was the best, and would do anything for her. But with everything going so well for Kara, it was harder to admit how messed up her own life had become. So she'd said nothing—although Elise realized her window of not discussing it with her best friend dwindled more each day. If Kara didn't hear about from her, likely Chase or Zeke would hear the industry chatter regarding the smear campaign before long. And then, when the review hit the stands in two weeks, it would be game over.

  Elise knew she probably should ask Kara for help, see if there were a few more brides she could nudge her way, but Elise hated not being able to hack it on her own by the strength of her hard work and convictions. Unfathomably stupid on her part, but where she came from, you relied on yourself and didn't take handouts. That was her father's work ethic speaking in her ear. As much as she'd tried to get away from her upbringing, it hounded her every step.

  Granted, if her Hail Mary Pass didn't work, Elise would find herself back on her folks' farm in Kentucky. She shuddered at the thought. She was an avowed city girl. Give her towering steel and concrete over cow and horse manure any day of the week. Most of her family couldn't understand why she'd lit out of her little Podunk town for college in the Big Apple. She had just always known she wanted more for her life. Not that there was anything wrong with country living, it just wasn't her first choice for where she wanted to live. Elise loved having conveniences at her fingertips. Driving thirty minutes or more just to go to the grocery store—or any other store, for that matter—was not her idea of a good time.

  Country living was not for Elise, never had been, as much as she'd tried to fit in during high school. She'd always had a curious mind and a fascination with people, add in a dash of insatiable wanderlust and voilà: a handcrafted urbanite.

  She loved that this trip added another stamp to her passport. After she'd graduated college, she'd had a three-month gap between the start of her internship and end of classes. Elise had used that time to backpack through much of Europe and never regretted it for a minute. She actually believed it was what made her so good at designing wedding gowns. Travel of any kind infused the brain with new ideas and ways of being. For her, the chance to stand inside the Basilica and in St. Peter's Square, meander through the Louvre, and walk along stone ramparts of a castle in Germany, had all expanded her scope and given her inspiration she'd been able to filter and channel into her designs.

  Scotland was lovely. Even as the land changed into its winter coat, the rolling bleak hills and vales suited her mood perfectly. What surprised her most was the lack of trees. There were some, but the land was more open field with copses of trees that had already shed their finery and now stood like eerie, dark-silhouetted skeletons waving their bare
branches in the breeze.

  When the manor home came into view, it seemed to rise out of the earth like a bastion against time itself. Elise couldn't stop an involuntary shudder from sweeping along her spine. One man owned all of this. It reminded her, somewhat, of the great horse farming estates back home in Kentucky that sprawled for miles on end. To call a place like this home meant money was no object, and the power that was inherent from owning an estate of this magnitude meant that one false move on her part could end her career faster than any smear campaign or review.

  Elise popped another Tums.

  She could do this, get back in the batter's box and hit a home run with the bride's dress. It would put her company back on the upswing and lessen the blows from the nasty review and smear campaign. She just had to continue sewing a fabulous dress for the bride one stitch at a time.

  The cab pulled alongside the van in the circular stone drive. Elise took a few steadying breaths before she exited the vehicle, hiding her trembling hands. She was about to enter the lion's den and she couldn't show fear. She would walk into that manor and appear fearless if it killed her. Elise had learned, swimming in the shark-infested waters of the industry in Manhattan, to never let people think for even a minute that she couldn't totally take them down. Regardless that she was a more of a pacifist and her inner workings could be rightly compared to a marshmallow rather than a steel forge.

  "Let's get you inside out of the chill first, and then the cabbie and I will get all of your things, Miss Beauregard."

  She nodded at Jared, her throat tight as she tried not to hyperventilate. She could do this. Elise repeated the litany in her brain. Faking it that she was calm and collected had become so ingrained, no one even saw beneath the exterior, not even Kara. Elise liked it that way, even though it was exhausting to maintain such a charade.