Chapter 10

That night I was too excited to sleep. I lay awake, feeling alternately weepy and giggly. I couldn’t believe I had managed to pull it off. I was now a seasoned dominatrix. Well, at any rate, I had one hundred per cent more in-the-flesh experience than I did this time yesterday.

Working on the phones, I’d had to listen to a thousand different orgasms, from muted groans to wild, hoarse shouts. Some of the callers had sounded as if they were about to die when they came; others had almost sobbed with thankfulness and gratitude.

It had always felt strange to listen to these intimate moments. Now, though, I had to admit it had been far more bizarre to watch one.

After Lowly’s session had finished, he had disappeared into the bathroom carrying his clothes and emerged fifteen minutes later, freshly showered and looking ready for the office again.

‘Thank you,’ he’d said with a shy smile, handing over a wedge of folded cash. ‘That was most exhilarating, Mistress. It was exactly what I needed.’

Ah, recognition and reward. One of the career perks I’d never thought about. I felt a glow of pride at his words. To my amazement, he booked in again for the same day and time the next month. My first client had also become my first regular.

Cleaning my dungeon after Lowly had left, I’d wondered what he was thinking during his session; what had really been going on in his capricious, intelligent mind as he’d surrendered himself to pleasurable pain at the hands of a brutal female stranger. Did his employees, or his superiors, suspect for a moment that he had a dark side?

I wonder what they would have done if they’d seen him bent over on the floor wearing the lacy panties, and the thought occurred to me that I wasn’t the only one who was putting myself at risk during these sessions. I might be compromising my security and laying myself open to abuse, but so were my clients.

So were they. And they probably had far more to lose.

The next morning, with the electricity supply thankfully restored, I met my second client. His name was Judge Farah. I had no idea whether this was his real name or his nickname, but it suited him, since the first impression I had when he arrived was of his hawklike features, steel grey hair and imperious bearing, which suggested that he was a man of power and authority.

He pulled up at the gate five minutes early, peering over the steering wheel of a brand new Range Rover. I say ‘peering’ because the one area in which the good Judge was somewhat lacking was height. He was so short that when he stepped into my dungeon and I stood in front of him I could look down at the bald spot in his silver-threaded dark hair and see the medallion dangling from the thick gold chain he wore around his neck.

‘How’s it going?’ he said, shaking my hand with a firm grasp. ‘How’s it going, darling? You’ve got a very nice place. Out in the middle of nowhere, isn’t it? Right out in the countryside, hmm?’ His eyebrows rose as he took in the black-painted interior. ‘Very nice,’ he repeated.

Unlike Lowly, the Judge wanted to discuss his session in detail first. He was very clear and precise about what he wanted.

‘Darling,’ he said, as I brought him his coffee, ‘I like hard penetration.’

The cup slipped from my grasp and banged down on the desk, sending a tidal wave of the brew slopping into his saucer, and he roared with laughter at my discomfiture.

‘Don’t be scared,’ he said. ‘I won’t bite you. I just love being fucked in the arse by a woman. Pegging, it’s called, sweetheart. I fucking love being pegged. Do you have a strap-on?’

He was quite disappointed to discover that I didn’t. I must say, I was rather relieved. For the life of me I couldn’t quite get my head around strapping an artificial penis to my hips and banging away at somebody’s backside. It sounds ridiculous, but I doubted whether I had the coordination to perform this task successfully. I had visions of mistiming a thrust and causing some sort of spinal injury with my dildo – or worse still, creating internal damage. I mean – how would he explain that to his medical aid?

At some stage, I knew, I’d have to man up and do the dirty – if not on the Judge, then on one of my other clients. For now, though, I told him that since the strap-ons were not yet available I’d do the best I could with what I did have. Which was a total of three long, slender candles. I needed to go vibrator shopping, and urgently.

‘You’ve got nothing else?’ he asked in disappointed tones when I indicated the candles.

‘New stock is only arriving tomorrow,’ I told him in a firm voice. ‘But I’m sure I can satisfy you with these today.’

‘I’m not so sure,’ he grumbled. He pushed his chair back and panic clenched at my insides because I thought he was going to get up and leave. He didn’t, though. Instead he reached into one of his trouser pockets and produced a small, brown, glass vial.

‘So, anyway. Do you know what this is?’ he asked me.

Oh, Jesus, my dungeon had become a destination for users of banned substances.

‘N–not exactly,’ I stammered. ‘I’m guessing it’s a drug of some kind?’

‘It’s poppers, sweetie. Amyl nitrite. If you’ve never tried it, you should. It gives you a hell of a rush. A hell of a rush, straight away. If you don’t have a problem with me using it, I’ll inhale it while you fuck me.’

‘Er …’ I swallowed, wishing fervently that I could have Lowly back again. Snippets of medical warnings I’d read a long time ago floated up from my memory. ‘Do you have any physical problems that might preclude its use? Any type of heart condition?’

He tucked the bottle back in his pocket and spread his arms wide. ‘Darling, I won’t lie to you. I’ve had a heart bypass and I’m on antihypertension drugs thanks to all the crap I have to deal with during my working day.’

‘If that’s the case I don’t think I …’ I began, but he cut me off, holding up a broad-fingered hand. ‘D’you know what? I don’t give a shit. It’s my heart and it’s my life. If I die, I want to die happy.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Right.’

I could just picture the story headlining our local paper.

‘Client Fatality Occurs at Resident’s Illegal Domination Dungeon.’

I should refuse to do what he asked. Medically, it was unsafe, and if he did suffer a cardiac event I’d end up in major trouble.

Although – maybe not, as long as he didn’t actually die on me. I could always call an ambulance if the worst happened. And right now, I was in no position to turn away business.

‘If a medical emergency happens, I can’t be held responsible,’ I said.

‘Look, darling, I know, ok? I know, I know, I know. If I was that worried, I wouldn’t be here, would I? You want me to sign a disclaimer or something?’

I had a feeling that any such document wouldn’t be worth the paper it was written on.

‘Just write down the contact details for your next of kin.’ Seeing his expression, I added hastily, ‘Or a good friend. Someone I can get in touch with if anything does happen. And who won’t try to sue me.’

‘Well, that rules out my ex-wives,’ he grumbled. ‘They both milked me for every goddamned cent I had.’

‘I need that number,’ I insisted.

He ummed and ahhed and argued, but in the end he scrawled a name and a cellphone number down on a piece of paper. ‘That’s Marcus Newman, my operations director. He’ll sort things out, no fuss, if it comes to that.’

‘Right, then,’ I said, after briefing him on the safe word. ‘If you need to use the bathroom, it’s over there. We’ll start as soon as you are ready.’

He left his car keys on the desk when he went into the bathroom, and for a minute I was tempted to do a runner. Climb into his car and start it up and drive. Where, I didn’t care. Anywhere would do as long as it was far away from my dungeon, and from the Judge, and from hard penetration.

Instead, I took off my trench coat and when the Judge strutted out of the bathroom stark naked and holding the bottle of poppers in his right hand, I was waiting for him by the punishment horse in my full regalia. In my right hand I held a whip and in my left I was brandishing one of the orange candles, liberally coated with KY jelly.

‘Bend over,’ I ordered. ‘You’ve earned yourself a light whipping, just to warm up that greedy little backside of yours. And then I’m going to give it to you hard and fast.’ Rather like the way I was breathing. ‘I’m going to fuck your tight little hole and punish you forcefully with this specially long candle.’ Which thanks to my current state of tension was also likely to be a specially vibrating candle. ‘And you’re going to have to take it, aren’t you? Aren’t you?’ I repeated, in a voice that sounded as if I’d been inhaling helium.

‘Go ahead, darling,’ he groaned, prostrating himself over the horse and treating me to the sight of his hairless crack and puckered arsehole. ‘Give it to me, deep and hard.’

It is a very odd feeling inserting a lubricated candle up somebody’s bum. It wasn’t difficult to do – it slid in quite easily, and before I knew it the candle was buried a good six inches.

And the Judge loved it. He yelped and moaned and let out long, gurgling cries. He begged me for a bigger candle and to put it in deeper. He thumbed open the bottle of poppers and propped himself on his elbow and sniffed and snorted as he inhaled it. And then I really thought he was going to have a heart attack. His breath started coming in short, wheezing gasps and his left hand clutched, claw-like, at the corner of the horse. His legs quivered and then, as I froze in terror at this reaction, every muscle in his body seemed to turn to rock.

‘Aaaaaargh!’ he groaned. ‘Aaaaaargh! Don’t stop now, you bitch. Give it to me hard!’

A red mist descended on me as I picked up another candle – and then bunched all three of them together. I did my best to erase from my memory the details of what followed. Thankfully, a few minutes later, his ear-splitting cry declared the session over.

A quarter of an hour after that, the Judge was leaving, replete and relaxed and joking with me as he climbed into his oversized vehicle and started it up.

I was still trembling slightly when I disposed of the discarded poppers vial, which I saw was packed with cotton wool. I cleaned up the area where he’d dropped it, trying my best not to breathe while I did this. I used tissues to pick up the three candles I’d used on him before throwing them away. Then I washed my hands in hot water twice with the gloves on and twice again with them off, squeezed the gloves out and put them in the sun to dry. Finally, I stood by the window looking out at the newly mowed lawn, gave a big theatrical shiver and said, ‘Aaaaargh.’

Just as the Judge had done, though for different reasons.

At least it was over now. I’d done it. Hard penetration held no mystery for me now. I could only hope that my next client, Simon, didn’t want the same service, because I was temporarily all out of stock in the anal toys department.