by Adira August
“You were excellent today. So far. I expect to get a similar report from Wood for the rest of the day. Wood has your schedule for the rest of the day. Is there anything you’d planned to do?”
She was blinking back the tears that had welled during her last spanking. “I want to see Hunter.”
“No. Anything else?”
“I usually check in with Talli every day.”
“When?”
“It varies.”
“I’ll tell Wood.” His text alert sounded. “That it?”
“Yes, Sir.”
He read the forlorn look on her face. “Put your hand inside your pocket and grab the brush handle.”
She obeyed.
“Squeeze it. Think about what I did to you with it.” Her face warmed. “There it is,” he smirked. “I’ll do that again when you land in Hawaii.”
He sent a text. “When you feel anxious, you hold the brush and think about that. Feel it warm and form to your hand. Remember—you are where you are, the way you are, because I make it happen.” He put the cell away. “You’ll know I have you every time you sit. Or climb stairs.”
He noted her look of confusion and wished he could be there when she discovered what he meant and was grateful for the panty shields. She’d learn, as she would again and again, that accepting his will was accepting his love.
TWO BLACK SUVS WAITED at the curb when Ben led Avia outside. She carried only her messenger bag. She’d grabbed the puzzle cube from the table and put it in one skirt pocket. The other held the hairbrush.
Woodward waited for Avia by the “sexmobile,” Ben’s usual form of ground transport. The other vehicle was one of six SUVs assigned to Ben’s security team. Blakewell opened the rear door as soon as Ben appeared. Another member of the team waited in the front passenger seat.
Avia felt her chest tightening the closer they got to the point where he’d leave her.
Ben stopped and turned her to face him. “Your hand is cold.”
She wasn’t sure if she should respond.
“You’re allowed to talk to me, Avia.”
“You undid me,” she said. “I don’t know how to hold myself up without you, now.”
“Were you not listening, sub?” He gathered her in his arms and held her tightly. “You don’t do the holding. Your fear is a symptom of not understanding, yet. You will. Shortly.”
He kissed her forehead and released her, leading her to Woodward. The two men nodded to each other. Ben let go of Avia’s hand and walked away for the door Blakewell held open.
She would have watched him until he and the vehicle disappeared, but Woodward stepped into her sightline.
“Get into the back seat.”
Wood’s clipped tone got her attention; it was unmistakably an order. She’d never been spoken to that way by any of Ben’s staff. She heard the doors shut and the other vehicle’s engine start. She lifted on tiptoe to see over Wood’s shoulder-
-and was bent over with her wrists clamped in his hand at the small of her back as he plucked the brush handle first from her pocket.
WHAP! WHAP! WHAP! WHAP!
He’d spanked her in broad daylight right in front of her building. He’d done it over her skirt so fast she’d barely registered it was happening before it was over. He slid the brush back into her skirt pocket, released her wrists and caught her by the forearm as she stumbled.
The pain hit her. He might have delivered those strokes over her skirt, but he delivered them with power. Her already sore ass sang with renewed heat and pain. She stifled a sob.
“Acknowledge the order and do as you’re told.”
Acknowledge? She couldn’t think for a moment for her anger and humiliation.
He looked at her pocket.
“Yes, Mr. Woodward.” She opened the back door with her head up and as much dignity as she could muster.
She tossed her bag across the bench seat. As she stepped up and inside, she farted wetly and hot liquid splooshed out between her cheeks. She slid quickly onto the seat, rocking over to take the pressure off her sore ass, wondering what the hell was going on …
Semen. Ben had deposited a magnum of precum and cum inside her less than an hour ago.
“Extras are a good idea.”
He was smiling when he said it. He’d anticipated what she hadn’t even considered: what goes in, must come out.
“Sit up straight.”
Avia started; she’d forgotten Wood was there. But she complied, much to the discomfort of her spanked bottom. He reached across her and clicked her seat belt into place as if she were a child, pulling it tight across her lap. She muffled the yelp of protest that rose to her throat.
He glanced at her, and she knew Ben had told him what to do and why. Her face heated.
“Hands behind you while in the vehicle,” he told her.
She wasn’t surprised when he took a short spreader bar from underseat storage and affixed it around her legs just above her calves. He used a simple strap to tie her crossed ankles together and hooked it over one of the open eyebolts just under the seat.
The custom SUV was the highest ticket item on Ben’s website. There was a six-month wait.
Once Wood closed the door, she realized her position prevented her from easing the pressure on her ass, at all. In fact, with her knees spread and her feet pulled in, the sorest part was forced down firmly. Every curb and bump Woodward drove over rekindled the pain and heat.
She was sure if she brought her hands out from the small of her back to press on the seat and relieve some of the pressure, he would see her in the rearview mirror. He’d stop the car and handcuff her—after he spanked her, again.
Her knees tried to close, her feet to get purchase. It was impossible.
She was helpless to do anything but accept what Woodward had done. Ben’s stand-in. The vibrations of the engine, the contact of tires and pavement, all thrummed a steady buzzing soreness through her bottom.
Her head dropped back, eyes closed. Ben’s hand flat on her sacrum, the back of the brush, the contact, the sound, the power, the pain … restrained, helpless, taking his cock …
The burn swelled again. But this time it spread inside her thighs, along her vulva, up her spine. Her clit swelled. Her core ached. Her sphincter throbbed. The discomfort faded under the deep arousal he hadn’t allowed her to experience and her driving need for the orgasm he hadn’t given her.
you are where you are, the way you are, because I make it happen
Ben was still with her.
“YOU’RE ON THE WAY TO CENTENNIAL?”
“It’s hard to tell, right now,” Ben told Hugo over cell. “Hang on.” He flipped the SUV’s intercom.
“Blakewell, let’s at least drive the speed limit. I’d like to get to the airport before the plane takes off.”
“Yes, Mr. Hart.”
He shut off the intercom. “Looks like ETA twenty-five minutes,” he told Hugo.
“You haven’t seen the news this morning?” Hugo came back.
“Not yet, I just got in the car.”
“You missed yesterday, too.”
“I was distracted,” Ben told him, thinking of Avia on her knees.
“The big international story is cockroaches.”
Ben laughed.
“Don’t laugh, Boss. These bugs are about to screw your multi-billion dollar contract.”
Ben brought a news scroll up on his cell. Macau Luxury Hotels: Candy on Every Pillow, Roaches in Every Sink.
“What the hell, Hugo? How many hotels has this hit?”
“Six. Cheong’s entire Macau chain.”
“Is this a joke?” He read through the story. The infestations were massive, the exodus of guests unprecedented. In forty-eight hours, the Cheong hotel chain had become ghost buildings.
“‘Government biologists are stymied by the suddenness and extent of the infestations’?” Ben read aloud. “This story is two days old. How did I not hear about this?”
“You we
re distracted,” Hugo said drily. “There’s more. People returning to their home countries or checking into other hotels from a Cheong Macau hotel are carrying plagues of bedbugs in their luggage. They’re infested, their cars are infested, the planes they were in are infested.”
“Bill and Ted’s Entomological Adventure?”
“Yeah. Only in real life people have been known to set fire to their own houses or suicide because of bedbug infestations,” Hugo told him. “These aren’t tourists in budget motels. These are high-rollers, poker whales, politicians, captains of industry—all the designators for rich, influential people you really don’t want to piss off.”
“You mean my potential customers.”
“Mr. Hart,” Hugo said in the firm tone he used when he thought Ben wasn’t paying attention. “This was done to him.”
Ben considered it. “I didn’t order this, Hugo. Are you implying I’m some sort of suspect?”
“I’m not sure, but I don’t think so. The species of cockroach is specific to Australia. Considering the timing, so close to you closing this deal-”
“-it’s a third party trying to stall it?”
“Or abort it completely,” Hugo offered.
“You have a scenario?”
“Possibly a hostile buyout. If Cheong gets exclusive rights to distribute Hart products, it increases the value of his properties. Or possibly he’s refusing to sell. They’re showing they can attack until he loses so much business he’s begging them to buy.”
“Well, whatever it is, it’s a power play I don’t want Hart Enterprises in the middle of,” Ben said. “I’m stopping in L.A. for a meeting. I’ll call Cheong from a landline, see if I need to postpone. Talk to you then.”
“Yes, sir.” They clicked off.
Ben stared sightlessly out the window as the SUV sped down I-25. His plan, which Hugo had never been privy to, had been in the works for months. But it only involved the Cheong Palace, not his whole Macau chain. And evacuating the hotel didn’t involve bugs; it involved minor fires on several floors. While everyone was distracted, Cheong’s entire stable of child sex slaves were to be spirited away in a dedicated elevator to the basement where a series of panels trucks and SUVs would carry them to safety.
Once that was accomplished and the victims were on a cargo ship headed out to sea, Ben anticipated watching the building come down in a spectacular, controlled demolition from the thermite charges that had been set over the last week. And if Cheong was in his palatial penthouse office when it went down, that was a bonus.
He did think Cheong would question how fires burning hotel furnishings, office equipment and gaming tables at relatively low temperatures could generate enough heat to melt the steel girders of a high-rise building. And while Ben knew it wasn’t possible, he had only to refer Cheong to official U.S. government reports about the destruction of three towers on the ninth of September in 2001 and blink innocently. It would be weeks before analysis of microspheres confirmed thermite.
But even before cockroachgate, Ben had decided to abort the demolition part of the plan. It wasn’t just that Nicky was right about the inevitable retaliation. The hard fact was there was no possible way to guarantee the collapse of the building wouldn’t kill innocent people. No reason to believe Cheong wouldn’t double his efforts to supply his sick constituency with victims in his other hotels, afterward.
But even if he didn’t blow the sociopathic pervert up, Ben could still have saved the seventy-three children he knew about under cover of the relatively easy-to-extinguish fires.
With the recent bug attacks and silence from his man on the ground, he had no idea if any part of his plan was salvageable. The events did give him an out of the exclusive rights deal. Cheong obviously had powerful, deadly enemies. Hart Enterprises, Ben would apologize, must distance itself until Cheong’s situation became more stable.
And while the sabotage of his hotels was mildly useful, the children were still living hellish lives, and the cockroaches and bedbugs were still a mystery.
Ben watched shadows race along the desert floor miles below, cast by scudding clouds around the plane he was riding in. How could such a massive, overnight invasion could be executed? Someone had to have used the elevator cores, the place his demolition team would have accessed to set the deadly explosive charges. Only instead of thermite, someone had set off literal “bug bombs.”
Please. Let me do it without you.
Ben laughed out loud with relief and delight. The children were safe. That son of a bitch. He always was one to act independently when he thought his way was best and damn the consequences. He’d used Ben’s money to ignore Ben’s orders and still carry out Ben’s basic plan.
Billionaire Benedict Hart had been saved by his “gardener.” Saved from hurtling headlong down a black tunnel of despair and powerlessness to his own moral destruction and possibly the actual destruction of those he loved.
When his man came home, Ben would have to give him a raise.
WOOD ESCORTED AVIA around a discount department store six blocks from her condo. He stood by while she picked out a package of the thickest plain cotton panties she could find in the darkest blue. They didn’t have black. There were six to a pack. She bought two packs, having no idea how often or long she might have Wood as Ben’s stand-in, in the future.
He got a little lost finding the women’s hair products. She let him wander and didn’t offer advice. It wasn’t her place. She wasn’t responsible. She found herself smiling a little at the freedom of it.
It occurred to her, when he turned down the wrong aisle for the third time, that he did so when a group of people loomed ahead in the narrow spaces. He stayed ahead of her. If they had to go single file, he was always in front. The phrase “taking point” came to mind.
Woodward was protecting her—not from potential attackers—from potentially anxiety-producing encounters with strangers.
Two aisles later, she faced a wall of hair brushes. Several of them had the word “paddle” in their names. In fact, it was hard to look at them without seeing them as spanking implements. She giggled, startling Wood. He followed her gaze and smiled.
Reaching out, he selected an ergonomically designed, tear-drop shaped, handleless brush and offered it to her.
“Thank you Mr. Woodward,” she said, accepting his choice.
“Do you have paper and pen in your bag?”
“Yes. Pencils, actually. And my notebook.”
He nodded and headed for check-out
Later, in the large handicapped stall of the ladies room exchanging her silky, tearaway panties for the dark blue granny specials, it came to her. When Wood offered her the brush he’d selected, he wasn’t making a suggestion—he was making her choice. She wondered at her lack of resentment, her feeling of relief.
How much time had she spent in her life making decisions like that? Staring at an overabundance of choices as if what a hairbrush looked like or shampoo smelled like were matters of weight and significance? Not having to make choices, any choices, felt to her like luxury. Ben Hart was a billionaire who paid people to make all these mundane decisions for him. Avia felt unburdened.
Woodward was reading a text when she exited the ladies room. He put the cell away and led her outside. Walking to the car, her bathroom epiphany faded as she felt her distance from the silent man beside her and a familiar haze of disconnectedness settled over her.
“Avia.”
She’d had her head down, but looked up at the sound of her name. He had a hand around her biceps.
“You stopped.”
“I’m sorry.” Her face felt drawn and tight, as if she were wearing a facial mask.
His arm went around her shoulders. He walked her to the SUV, holding her tight to his side.
“Do you have your puzzle cube?”
“My… um - yes. In my pocket.”
He unlocked the car and opened the front passenger door. “You’ll ride up front with me.” She got in. “We’re
getting something to eat; you can talk to your sister until we arrive.”
Tears. When would she ever stop crying? “Thank you, Mr. Woodward.”
He nodded and went around to the driver’s door, leaving her to close her own door and fasten her own seat belt.
He was backing out of the parking space when she slid her hands behind her.
“You’re done with that. Sit comfortably.”
“Yes, Mr. Woodward.”
She loosened the seat belt a little and shifted to ease the pressure on her bottom. Sliding the cell into the hands-free bracket, he set it on speaker and nodded for her to make her call.
He was going to listen. Of course he was. No denial of access.
CHEONG ZONGYUAN, WHO CALLED himself John Cheong, strode furiously off the elevator into the parking garage, flanked by security people. He hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours, and now he couldn’t work in his office. A cockroach had scurried over his Rolex when he opened the single drawer in his Parnian custom-made desk.
Two security men and his assistant had heard him scream like a girl.
Girl. His entire stock of under-fourteens had disappeared along with the contingent that had taken over one elevator and the top five floors of the Palace. Very big money. All those rooms were empty. His guests had fled faster than roaches under a spotlight.
There were bedbugs in the poker felt and roaches in the kitchens. Most of the staff ran off before the guests did. The two security people walking him to his Bentley had positioned themselves further from him than security protocols demanded. Like his clothes might be contaminated.
The thought made his skin crawl.
The four men in paramilitary black came out of the shadows between two black vans. His security people were down and unconscious in seconds. He was dragged—screaming threats and curses in several languages—into the back of one of the vans, bound and gagged. Outrage was his first response. How dare anyone think they could humiliate him this way? Cheong was a man too arrogant to be afraid.
“Ow ya goin’, mate?”