Chapter Six
Catfight
In the days that followed, testy moments between Ella and Meri seemed more common than civil ones. Meri took every opportunity to criticize the girl’s work. She inspected everything with an eagle eye, sure to find something amiss.
“When Alain trained me, I got it right,” Meri snipped when she spotted a puddle of water on the floor after Ella had done the dinner dishes.
“I’m not done yet,” Ella snapped back.
Another day – “How about doing the counters over. You missed a bunch of grease by the stove.” Ella didn’t say a thing, but she grudgingly did what she was told.
Their snippy comments were out of Mrs. Langshire’s hearing distance, thankfully, or they would have both been marched in front of Alain the next time he was home. The housekeeper wouldn’t have put up with the sniping any more than Alain would have.
Then there was the day that a smug Ella turned to Meri as an equally arrogant Mrs. Danvers was getting something from the refrigerator – Mrs. Langshire was rummaging around the garage looking for some tool, so they were in the kitchen alone. “Too bad Sir hasn’t had the time to play with you, Mrs. Danvers. Especially since my sessions with him have been getting so…well, you know… involved. I know what he’s working up to and I can’t wait.”
“Working up to what?”
She giggled, very purposefully. “He’s going to screw my ass.” She looked as if she was practically in love with the thought.
“I thought that was supposed to be your master’s job.”
“Oh, yeah sure, Robbie will do me…but I’m betting Sir won’t be able to resist. I mean he’s already getting so close. He fucked me with three, or maybe it was four fingers last night. Whatever it was it was damn fine and the man was getting into it. He tries to be so aloof,” she practically purred, “but I know when a man’s turned on.”
“I thought you hated anal?” Meri shot back, her eyes like two piercing arrows.
Ella laughed cheerfully. Meri had never seen her quite like this before. But it didn’t shock her. All that Meri had believed about the girl seemed to rise to the surface of her normally subdued personality and took over the submissively posing female, turning her into something very different than the woman she pretended to be in the Danvers’ household. “Oh, you have no idea…” she came back with the purposely vague and sassy comment. By that time, Mrs. Langshire was coming in through the back door and the conversation died.
This was all the ammunition that Meri needed to focus her venom on Ella. Although, this was not something as contrived on Meredith’s part as it was the unconscious ‘green with envy’ rage that naturally rose from feeling superfluous to Alain with this other submissive in his house.
When Mrs. Langshire was out of the house, the subtle claws of feline power came out scratching – like when Meri popped downstairs to get her underwear from the laundry and found Ella sorting towels.
“My lingerie?” Meri asked, not seeing the pile she expected to find anywhere on the counter.
“Oh, yes, right. You put it in a hot dryer, did you know that? I thought it was a little strange, but then that seemed to be what you wanted…so…” The girl fished through a pile of clean laundry and pulled out Meri’s shriveled underwear.
“A hot dryer? I don’t remember doing that. Ever!”
Ella stared at her, a Cheshire cat grin plastered on her face…”
Meri swiped the underwear and went upstairs to dress.
As soon as Mrs. Langshire returned to the house, Meri had to leave; she was late for a lunch date with a friend. She didn’t have time to think about the nasty exchange with Ella. However later, when the memory of that prickly exchange came back to her, she felt the full force of Ella’s viciousness and realized clearly what a rival the bitch had become. The things she could have said, should have said were still knocking through her brain when she woke up the next day. She’d be damned if she’d let the little slut win any battle in this house.
So it became a matter of small things…household items out of place, as if Ella had misplaced or even swiped them…alterations in a recipe that caused her cake to fall…adjustments to the timer that scorched the dinner rolls…sugar in her husband’s coffee, something he determinedly despised – no one fucked with the man’s coffee. Meri made certain that these small things were creatively accomplished without anyone seeing the culprit. Mrs. Langshire would be left to assume that Ella was getting much too casual with her chores and Alain would soon find out.
After a few days of carefully executed sabotage, Meri could almost see the distress on Ella’s face. Any minute, she expected that the girl would be punished for a long string of faults; some weren’t even Meri’s doing. The girl was coming unglued.
Then finally there was the night when Meri snuck into the kitchen while no one else was there. The pot roast was cooking on the stove. She ‘adjusted’ the seasoning, setting the salt back on the counter and skipped off. It didn’t matter that Alain’s favorite dish was ruined, hopefully Ella would be too.
This was the first dinner he’d eaten in the house in days, and of course, he noticed the problem right away.
“I didn’t touch it, sir,” Meri said, without batting an eye.
Mrs. Langshire and the trainee were called in, and though Alain was kind enough, he was hardly happy.
“Let me taste?” Mrs. Langshire took a bite. “That’s nasty!” She turned to Ella.
“Hey, not me this time,” Ella said, her eyes lighting evilly. “It was Meri. I saw her with the salt shaker, pouring it on…I mean I thought she was maybe overdoing it…but who am I but a trainee?”
The swiftness of Alain’s anger was shocking. He turned directly to his wife, “Meri—”
He didn’t have to say another word. He’d already decided. Accused. Tried. Convicted. Before she could say a word.
She was caught without warning, a terrible liar, whose face showed innocence or guilt with little effort. Every time. Without Fail. Once confronted, all was lost. Alain knew the truth and she wouldn’t dare deny it.
“But she’s a bitch, Alain!” Meri blurted out. “She’s a fucking bitch.” The rage was all around her like a dragon’s sour breath. She had so much more to say, but seeing the look on her husband’s face, she didn’t dare start.
“Mrs. Langshire, the wooden spoon from the kitchen,” Alain ordered.
“Yes, sir.” Mrs. Langshire padded toward the kitchen and returned quickly with the old antique butter paddle with the long handle and the fat mean end.
“That’ll do.” He swiped the paddle from the woman’s hand and turned to his wife. “Up.”
“But sir!” She looked up mournfully.
“Don’t you dare, Meredith,” that warning tone again.
“But you haven’t heard what I have to say—”
“There’s nothing you have to say that I want to hear.”
Never had a rebuke cut so deep. For several seconds she stared at him, until something jarred inside her body and she rose to her feet. Trembling, embarrassed…all her careful conniving and now she felt as transparent as glass. The humiliation of it was the worst. There before the devious Ella and Mrs. Langshire.
She was shoved to the sideboard, pushed over the end, her skirt swept aside, and the butter paddle raining blows on her ass until her cheeks glowed red and hot.
She thought her husband would never stop, but of course he did. And with the punishment over, he drew her to her feet.
“Now sit down, I have more to say.” He turned to the small audience, composed as ever. “If you will excuse us, please.”
Mrs. Langshire was ready to go, and because Ella hesitated a bit too long, she tugged the girl by the arm and led her out.
When Alain turned back to his wife, Meri’s hands were folded neatly in her lap. Her head was bowed, but she hardly felt subdued. Her smarting butt was painful to sit on, and if anything, her anger only had more ammunition. But that hardly swayed Ala
in. He was pissed, and the feeling wasn’t going anywhere. Not yet.
“If you think that I punished you because of tonight’s dinner, you’re wrong,” he started in. “Your ungracious and accusatory behavior toward Ella has not gone unnoticed. Your jealousy has hardly been kept under wraps. If you think it has, you’re truly naïve. And if you think I’ll put up with this a moment longer, then you don’t know me very well.”
“I-I’m sooo—”
She couldn’t even get the words out of her mouth before he’d interrupted her. “I don’t want ‘I’m sorrys’. I want a change in attitude. And I want that now. Tonight, you’re going to change places with Ella. You’ll sleep in the maid’s room tonight. Ella will be with me.”
Her jaw dropped as she heard the sentence. “Alain, no! Please! You wouldn’t!”
Resting his hands on the table, he leaned forward and looked her directly in the eye, “Yes, Meredith. I don’t want another word from you.” He waited a moment, as if making sure that she got the message, then he stood up straight, calling out, “Mrs. Langshire!”
The woman promptly appeared in the doorway.
“Yes, sir?”
“Mrs. Danvers will be changing places with Ella until further notice. Move Ella out of the upstairs maid’s room. Meri will be sleeping there tonight.”
The woman was surprised, but she took the announcement in stride and left to make the arrangements.
“I’d rather you just hauled me off to the dungeon,” Meri said mournfully.
“I’m sure you would.”
“You don’t know how embarrassing this is! You don’t know what that bit…”
“Don’t say another word unless you’d like to spend the next two hours in the closet before the rest of your punishment begins.”
She shut up fast.
***
Meri lay in the maid’s room down the hall; the one that had been hers for several months when she first lived with Alain before they were married. Then, it had been a special place. It was close to the man she loved, inside his house, near to his heartbeat, and the sensuous darkness of the man that held her so enrapt. Often he bound her to the bed where she sweated out nights alone with her desires attacking her in the groin and no way to satisfy her growing lust. But even these tortures had their own satisfaction because the man she so desired was attending to her. She would never fight him then as she did now. He held her every thought, every feeling, every act in his grasp, knowing exactly what was right and what she needed at every turn.
She could almost feel those same feelings rise up as she lay in the maid’s room, but that sensation was only brief. The memory of the disastrous dinner refused to quit repeating inside her brain…over and over, a miserable mantra for a hellish night.
He came to bind her to the bed himself, roping her hands first and tying them off to the headboard’s iron bedposts. He splayed her legs apart and tied them to the foot posts, left and right. His mood was typically formal, considering that this was punishment, but his anger seemed to have fled.
When he turned to leave, he left her cold and naked without a blanket.
“Alain, please, sir, couldn’t you at least cover me up?”
He stood at the doorway looking back. “Not tonight, I can’t. Suffer through it. It will do you good.”
“But Alain please!”
“Don’t make me gag you, Meredith. If you start hollering, you’d better have a very good reason.”
He left the room and Meri to the miserable night ahead.
Her night in the maid’s room might have been as erotically pleasing as all those many nights before she married Alain, but as if a spear had been thrust into her side and hung there in a gaping wound, there would be no such pleasure while she lay in the tiny room and her husband was with another woman in his.
The conniving bitch would sleep in her husband’s bed. Was he fucking her too? Was that it? She could already see the girl’s gloating face, the triumph written in her saccharine attitude. The fucking little bitch was trying to put a wedge between them. She knew. Instinct. Woman’s intuition, it was all so plain to Meri now. And Alain had fallen right into that cunning woman’s trap.
Meri was awake for hours, her mind tortured by the thoughts of what was taking place in the master’s bedroom. She sobbed for a long while, and then must have fallen asleep. When she woke again she could hear sounds from down the hall. Alain had left the door open so she could hear it all…the crack of his hand, the smacking sound of wood on flesh…the female’s cries…the moans…the groaning anguish of an aroused submissive. Tears streamed from Meri’s eyes as she listened.
Then the house went quiet except for the ticking clock in the downstairs hall. The sound seemed to travel right up the stairs and into her room…but that was all. It didn’t even chime the hour. Maybe that was a good thing. She’d have no idea how many more hours she’d have to wait in anguish. With nothing else to do but agonize over her troubles, she fell asleep.
***
When Alain arrived in his bedroom, he found Ella laid out on the bed, reading a magazine, as if she’d been doing it every night for weeks.
“What in the hell are you doing?”
The girl jumped from the bed.
“Oops! Sorry. You snuck up on me.” She giggled and hung her head.
In the most obvious display he’d seen so far, the bolder Ella that lurked beneath the surface of her submissive posturing was systematically tucked back into hiding, replaced by the small movements and gestures that characterized her adopted role.
“I don’t even recall having invited you into my room.”
“But I thought…I mean I heard you tell Mrs. Langshire that I’d be trading places with Mrs. Danvers.” She peeked up at him sheepishly.
“That was not exactly what I meant, Ella. I meant only that my wife would be sleeping in the maid’s room. Where you sleep will entirely depend on how I’m feeling after our session tonight.”
The girl’s eyes lit a little, the seductive chameleon she was.
“For the moment, I have much to do and I don’t need you in my way.”
After fishing through his closet for a few lengths of rope, he bound the girl’s hands behind her, joining them to the rope dress. Then leading her out of the door, he ordered her to her knees and proceeded to bind her bent knees to her torso, so that she was curled up on her side in a tight little fetal ball.
“You think you can be quiet?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.” She looked up at him meekly.
He could hear her mood in the despondent tone of her voice and sighed inwardly, satisfied. This was obviously not what she expected, although it was certainly what she earned. “Long as you’re quiet, you won’t need the gag; you start sniveling, crying or shouting out, all that changes. You might spend your time thinking about why you’re spending the next two hours outside my bedroom door. You might even have some answers for me when I finally let you go.”
Having stated his aims, he closed the door, leaving Ella to wonder what had gone so horribly wrong.
It was after midnight when Alain finally opened the bedroom door and found the girl just as she’d been the last hour, twisting in frustration one minute, then lapsing into an almost sleepy state the next. It took a few moments for her to realize that he was standing over her. As she looked up, he could almost see a bit of hope in her lovely green eyes.
While Alain would have been more than happy to have the cunning Ella stay there all night, the bondage was too restrictive for so many hours. He let her loose and allowed her the next few minutes to get the blood flowing through her body again. While he waited, he sat on the end of the bed, his only instruction to her had been, “On your hands and knees, Ella.”
Once she was at his feet, he used his cane to tease her, watching with some fascination as she jerked and jumped every time he ran the tip of the thin bamboo down her flesh.
“We need to get a few things straight, Ella. As in, I know that this is just
a game for you. You’re very good at acting the part. You have all the important poses right. You even mimic the submissive attitude with some expertise. But you’re not on 24/7…that would be impossible for you, wouldn’t it? And when you’re not on, you’re a bold and brassy bitch who’s just in the scene for the thrill of it. You’d be lying to Robbie if you told him you were in this Dom/sub relationship for real. What could possibly be worse than having to put up with a dominant man for the rest of your life? I’m sure that would be impossible for you. Once the kinky fun’s worn off, you’ll move on to something else.
“And this whole thing about the anal sex being so tough.” He chuckled under his breath. “I’ll bet you’ve been fucked in the ass by a dozen men and haven’t balked once. So why now? Tell me.”
He stopped long enough to allow her to answer, and when she remained silent, he poked her in the side with the tip of the cane. “C’mon, sit back on your heels, lift your head and tell me. I want to hear it in your own words.”
The girl moved into a sitting position with her ass resting on her tucked feet. She seemed unusually subdued – and in a real way now.
“A girl tries all kinds of things to get a man,” she started, that little chip on her shoulder so plainly evident now. “I like Mr. Carvello. A lot. He turns me on. The whole submissive thing is kinda new but I followed along for the fun of it, like you said. So when it came to anal sex,” she shrugged, “well, it just seemed like I was too easy. The subbies I’d see around me were acting all freaked out by what their masters wanted them to do… so I freaked out for the fun of it. That make any sense?”
Alain tried not to laugh. “Maybe it does. And maybe you can be admired for being so creative, for trying something you know little about. Maybe Robbie will like that when he knows the truth—”
Honeymoon In Bondage Page 7