She lifted her head and nodded.
“Has she hurt you?”
She shook her head no, but the fright in her eyes made them dark and remote.
“She hurt someone you know?”
This time she nodded.
Daniel saw her pleading look and was curiously moved. Though not one to pander to slaves or display empathy for women under dire circumstances, he knew in his gut that this was the wrong place for the girl. She’d survive it. But since his return to civilization the demands of polite society had triggered some normal sensibilities about matters such as these. He’d found some errant morality surface in his character, urging him to do what was best for the girl not what was expedient for Marcus and him. Her curious appeal added enough to these newfound values to make the decision easy.
Have made his decision, he moved to his feet and announced, “She’s not staying.”
Marcus and Lady M abruptly turned and stared at him with baffled expressions until he finally explained himself as much as he would.
“I’ve changed my mind, Marcus. Until other arrangements can be made she’ll stay with me.”
“This isn’t what we—” Marcus started in.
“But this is what we’re doing,” Daniel quickly cut him off. He bent down and carefully pried the girl’s arm from around her knees and pulled up. They were out the door and in the car before the stunned Marcus could make his apologies to Lady M and exit the house.
***
Hours later at Daniel’s front door, he and Marcus spoke candidly about the girl for the first time since they left Lady M’s. Not a word had been said about Lisle during the drive back to Washington. She’d been awake and alert the entire time, likely expecting some conversation about the matter of her living arrangements. She gave neither man any argument when it became clear that she’d be living in Daniel’s house. They left her eagerly browsing magazines in his living room while Daniel escorted Marcus to the door.
“You’re gone until the end of the month? I’ll keep her until you’re back then I expect you to have other arrangements and transport her to a permanent situation within a week. You might want to put those feelers out before you leave so you’re not scrambling around for a suitable place as time is running out. A nice easy-going D/s couple looking for a sub would be a good choice.”
“Hey, my friend, I’m grateful for anything you can do.” The younger man looked greatly relieved—almost happy with the outcome—the very outcome he wanted in the first place if he were being completely honest. Daniel might have viewed Lady M as Marcus’s way of manipulating the outcome to suit his desire, however he laid responsibly for the ‘change in plans’ solely on Lisle. How he’d deal with her would be another matter.
“You’ll pay for this, you know?”
“Coming from you, Daniel, I’ll take that as a warning.” He managed a smile.
“I’m glad we understand each other,” Daniel glared back, practically pushing the man out the door.
Chapter Three
Remaking His Life
Daniel’s 18th century Georgetown home was built shortly after the Revolutionary War. The brick exterior was as solid as the men who inspired its times and looked much the same as it had for over two-hundred years. The interior, however, had been renovated in recent years several times, and when Daniel picked it out from a number of similar Colonial Houses, he did so because of the high ceilings and the solid oak floors and most particularly the white walls, the white molding and the white trim, the white around the fireplaces, the endless white in every nook and cranny. The vivid clarity of color reminded him of the desert, clean and warm—or cold—depending on the sun and the temperature of the day.
There was a center hallway that included the stairs to the upper levels of the house—two stories and a fourth floor attic. On the main level were long rooms on either side of the front hall. The two rooms were nearly identical with walls white, hardwood floors, fireplaces on the outside walls and windows symmetrically placed along the front looking out on the street. The room to the right as he faced the front door he used as his living room, the one on the left was his office. Behind the two main rooms were the large kitchen and laundry areas. A back door led to an overgrown walled garden and the stone building Daniel used as a garage. Beneath the first floor was an unfinished cellar.
On the second floor of the house was the large master suite along with a guest bedroom and a smaller room that contained nothing but a twin bed. On the third level was another bedroom, a storeroom and a TV/media room he knew he’d never use. The fourth floor attic space was pleasantly empty except for a few scampering mice.
When he bought the house, he inherited the previous owner’s cast off furnishings, all simple but stylish stuff. Sleek couches. Ergonomic chairs. Glass tables, a few wood tops to break the startling color scheme. He knew that scarcity appealed to him. He hated fussy. He hated clutter. And he saw no need to feather his nest any more than it already was. He had room to move and blank walls where his eyes could rest in peace without being required to admire some work of art he really didn’t like. He liked the click of his boots on the hardwood and the feel of the wood on his bare feet. Sometimes his house sounded like an echo chamber with an empty ring. He liked that, too.
He would have been just as happy in a tiny apartment with sagging 60’s furniture, bad plumbing and a hot plate in an efficiency kitchen. However, he’d left the Middle East with money to spend and his acquaintances in Washington urging him to enter into the 21st century and live like a normal man again—not that he ever had.
“Besides, Dan—” Alan from the State Department and a pretty decent guy was particularly persuasive on the issue, “Women might find a seedy, walk-up flat romantic for a night but if you want to attract serious women in this town you’d better have something nice to take them to once dinner’s over.”
Daniel wasn’t thinking about picking up women but Alan did have a point. Daniel had lived in hovels, Quonset huts, bunkers, walled compounds and tents for twenty years. Even he had to admit that a comfy mattress and a clean house were a welcome luxury he would enjoy.
He took a few antique pieces from a storage unit of family items and used them to augment the scantly furnished third floor. His sister Jolene, who lived in south Jersey had been particularly adamant that he have his father’s old desk, and then saddled him with several other odd pieces that she swore were valuable collector’s items—as if he cared about their money, which he didn’t. He figured she would have sold them herself if there’d been any real value. Since she wanted the storage unit emptied and she had no room in her overstuffed house, she called on him to do ‘his part’ for the family. This was all part of his re-entry into the real world.
Since Daniel had gone AWOL—his sister’s term—when he entered the military, he’d been the brother everyone talked about in furtive whispers but no one ever saw. It had been quite a shock to his family when their shy, solemn, but very brilliant brother, entered Harvard at sixteen only to drop out at eighteen to enter the Army. When his leg was badly mangled in a skirmish during the first Gulf War, he returned to the States to convalesce and finished his degree as if this was his plan all along. His family hoped he’d had enough of military life, but as soon as he was able, he returned to active service and dove in with even greater zeal as if he had something to prove to himself.
Returning home after twenty years hadn’t been easy, especially with his family eager to embrace him and help with the transition—help he didn’t ask for or want. The awkward young boy surfaced in him from time to time as he tried to fend off the overly solicitous attentions of his three sisters. They meant well, but he despised their fussing and their unwelcome advice. However, despite gruff rebukes that put them off for a few weeks, they always bounced back; their efforts to turn him into a polished 21st century man renewed as if it were their sacred duty.
In one of his more amenable moments—or maybe just because Jolene was trying so hard—he gave
in to her sisterly bluster in hopes of keeping her pacified. She was quite right, his house had plenty of empty rooms to store forgotten furniture from another era—places where it would no doubt sit forgotten and unused until he was carried out and the house passed on to another owner. For now, he imagined the 18th century timbers giving off a pleasant sigh once something familiar from its generation graced its rooms again.
Once Daniel settled in, which took no more than a day, he hired a thirty year old part-time housekeeper, Alice. The young woman was an anomaly in DC, as much a misfit as he was in the world of politics, manners and putting on a good show. She came dressed in white short-shorts and a tank top when she arrived the first day. She was quirky and a little impertinent, but she made him smile as she waltzed in with mop and bucket, her bare breasts swaying softly against the thin fabric of her t-shirt. She had a ring through her right nostril and several piercings along her left ear, as well as bleached blonde hair that was cut short in back and almost to her shoulders in front. The cut looked weird to him, but apparently it was currently in style. On her left shoulder and running down her back and arm was an elaborate tattoo of a garishly-colored parrot sitting in a nest of tropical foliage. He’d seen enough tattoos to know that this one was expertly done.
While the tattoo was a permanent part of her body, Alice changed her look on a daily basis; he never knew what she’d show up in next: a dress, fatigues and combat boots, bulky sweaters and jeans or her signature cutoffs and thin t-shirts. Her moods, her tastes and her attitudes toward life were a study in contrasts, interesting but not something that would take up much of his time. He never knew what crazy idea was going to pop out of her mouth, but she kept the place clean and did the laundry with military precision, all without a lot of direction, which was exactly what he wanted. If she questioned him about her duties or something about the house, he often shrugged—he really didn’t care—which seemed to give her permission enough to do whatever she wanted to do in the first place.
In addition to cleaning and laundry, she made regular trips to purchase food—something he rarely had to bother with in his other life. Left to his own devices now he would have eaten takeout every day just because it was easy, and then hated it; or eaten in whatever steak house suited his fancy.
Alice was happy, bright-eyed and resourceful, a hard worker but not the kind of woman one expected to be cleaning houses for the wealthy in Washington DC. She was also pleasant to look at. Though she was well-muscled and strong, she had a pleasing layer of fat that gave her softly shaped body a sensuous jiggle when she moved. She wasn’t pretty, but she was inherently sexy. He was not surprised to learn that she was the daughter of two 60’s radicals who were still trying to influence the power brokers in Washington. Her politics were liberal, her fashion sense and choice of music were well-rooted in the 60’s and her reading material touched on everything from self-help tomes to gardening magazines, to lesbian erotica and hard core S&M. She avidly denied being a lesbian. “I’m horny and basically open to anything, but I love c-o-c-k,” she announced the first week she was there.
She’d been raised in an organic, sustainable, healthy living atmosphere long before it was fashionable. When it came to purchasing food, she refused to buy Daniel the junk food he was used to. She filled his fridge with takeout items from the Asian food store in the neighborhood and various varieties of the Middle Eastern cuisine that were plentiful in the DC area. She filled in with food co-op items and organic veggies. No Manwich and Chef Boyardee in Daniel’s kitchen. When she was forced to throw out half of what she bought because it was left uneaten, she just dug in and began fixing him one-dish meals he could pop into the microware. He didn’t know much about what he was eating, and frankly
didn’t care, but most tasted decent, some even reminiscent of the food he ate in the Middle East, just better. Though Alice was only hired for three days a week she made sure he had at least two prepared meals so he wouldn’t have to try making anything on his own. He could cook bacon, eggs and toast, which she grudgingly bought when he started fuming about ‘all the damned granola,’ but she refused to cook them for him.
Unlike the many women in his past, forced to kowtow to his authority, she wasn’t impressed by his brusque personality, his clout or his moods. If he raised his voice, it hardly fazed her. He had the feeling she thought of him as a curiosity, a man who’d finally emerged from the 20th century into a world he would never quite understand—she wasn’t far from the truth.
Theirs was an amicable war, combative at times, but that was due to the sexual tension between them that flared up almost as soon as the two met. She was sexy, he was horny, and he couldn’t stare at her sturdy thighs and how they disappeared into her tight white shorts without jumpstarting his cock. Smoldering beneath the surface of their working relationship was an eroticism that neither one of them was apt to do anything about. After all, they were employer and employee and both respected that fact, thus they kept the subject of sex to a few passing daydreams.
However one morning a few months after their working relationship began the notion of sex became a necessary topic of conversation. Alice padded down the stairs and stuck her head in Daniel’s office, announcing without comment: “So, I moved your crops and whips into the cabinet in the back of your closet. I hope that’s okay?” She waited for a reply.
Until then, he’d forgotten he’d left the room a mess after a nasty session with a submissive he’d met through a DC acquaintance. Most of the fix-ups and blind dates he’d been on had been with strictly normal women, none of whom he wanted to date again. Knowing his taste in women and sex, his friend Bernie had introduced him to a thirty-five year old divorcee he’d ‘really’ like. Sure he liked her. She took to the whip without a problem and was quick to accommodate his physical needs, but she wanted a master, and he wasn’t in the mood for the kind of master/slave relationship the woman wanted.
Daniel looked up from his newspaper on hearing Alice’s voice. “Yes, sure, that’s fine. I’d intended to clean that up before you got here. Sorry about that.”
“Don’t be sorry, it weakens your masculine bravado.”
This made him sit up and stare. “Okay then I’m not sorry.”
“I know. You just said that to be polite.” This kind of sparring was common between them. Few people, particularly women, felt comfortable talking back to a man with such obvious authority and control issues, but Alice had no problem talking back to anyone. “Besides, I’ve seen that all myself.”
He peered at her directly. “Doesn’t surprise me.” And he went back to his reading.
“I mean that. Like seriously,” she persisted. “I know the lifestyle… cause I’m kind of on the fringes of it myself.” He had no desire to hear this, but she seemed determined to explain. “My roommate was collared by this master in New York. Real bad ass if you ask me. Anyway, leave your toys all over the place, I won’t care, they’ll just juice me up for later.”
His body instantly reacted to that inference, though with any luck she didn’t notice.
What he understood from the brief exchange was that she did care about his ‘leaving his toys all over the place’ as well as anything else that wasn’t put back where it belonged. That was a given with Alice; she liked an orderly house, just as he did. But there was more behind that short exchange than just a bit of informational commentary. Her disclosure about ‘the lifestyle’ was intended to be sexual, though to what purpose he was not yet sure.
Some days Alice was as sunny as summer, in fact most days she was almost too cheery for the dour mercenary. But then there were other days, when from the moment she entered the house she groused about everything. A pile of dirty socks in the bedroom corner, the pile of dishes in the sink and worst of all pizza boxes and fast food wrappers still reeking with the smell of grease lying on the coffee table in the living room.
She talked to herself when she was annoyed. “You think I’m a maid,” all under her breath, of course. On that p
articular day he caught her in the act of muttering complaints while she was bent over his bed smoothing down the covers.
“You are my maid,” he brought her upright in seconds with the terse remark.
“Hey, that was private!” she barked back.
“Then fucking keep your mouth shut if you have any further editorial comments about my life.”
Later in the kitchen, still fuming, she scrubbed the countertops with a vengeance. Daniel found her there in the midst of the task, her breasts bouncing back and forth almost angrily. She was wearing a t-shirt dress so when she bent over he could see her white cotton panties tight against her plump ass cheeks—a sight he never grew tired of.
He almost started to laugh at the fuming woman, but didn’t. “Is there some problem here? I say something? Do something?”
She stood up and faced him squarely.
“It’s more like what you’re not doing.” Her lips were pursed and she rolled her eyes.
He looked as befuddled as he felt. “This isn’t a guessing game.”
“Are you really that clueless?” she shook her head in amazement. Mouth open, she struggled to say more but couldn’t find the words.
“Ah,” it finally came to him, “if you mean about the sexual tension? Of course, I’m not clueless. But that is not the nature of our relationship. You don’t belong to me.”
“Belong to you? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Sorry. Poor choice of words. I forget where I am.”
She cocked her head. “So you’re just ignoring it?”
“Of course.”
She strolled toward him looking a little more friendly. “I’m an easy girl to know, Daniel…” she stopped, suddenly perplexed, “you know, I think I should be calling you something else, sir or Colonel, can I call you Colonel?” She cocked her head.
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