First Official Business at the House
The storm wore itself out overnight and was just a light mist as the sun rose. Cassandra awoke early, started the coffee and showered as though in a dream. Mixed emotions about her previous night’s adventure flooded her mind. That she’d broken down the reserve of a handsome, stubborn, upright, heroic character like Michael Flagg so effortlessly, had seduced him so easily, curved her pretty mouth into a smile. But that expression faded when she visualized his beautiful, proud wife, still carefully wet nursing their thriving baby. Marguerite was the Queen Bee of Random Point’s inner BDSM clique and had been a pet of Hugo Sands and Anthony Newton for many years. No one would be okay with the notion of some outsider from the ancient past suddenly appearing in the village to bewitch the men of the resident belles. It was bad enough to have temporarily tempted Anthony away from Susan, but Marguerite had an even greater and more dignified hold on her man, Michael, who was hard won to her after a very long and frustrating courtship, interrupted by imprudent first marriages on both sides. And for that matter, how would Anthony feel about Cassandra making love to other men at the house? Knowing Anthony even as little as she did, she suspected he would be relieved, for he had had to abandon her to all intents and purposes as a lover as soon as Susan returned to Random Point and that would be bothering him. And yet, mightn’t he still be jealous? She was extremely cognizant of her responsibilities as mistress of the house, the foremost of which was to get it opened for business as soon as possible. Or at the very least, make sure a number of subs were booked to visit while Anthony was still in residence for the summer. Cassandra sensed the best she could do to justify his investment would be to provide him with an ever-varying supply of interesting new lady-girls to play with and show off to his scene friends in the village. He would be thrilled to hear that Michael Flagg was already planning a rendezvous there. But wait, should she be revealing the details of sessions in the house even to Anthony? Would that not violate Michael’s privacy and that of whatever lady he was bringing? That everyone knew each other so well challenged discretion.
Cassandra longed to confide in someone about all of this, and that person was Amanda. Cassandra laughed to herself as she pictured Amanda’s face hearing of all she had done. She had always been Amanda’s confidante. All through high school, as well as through her first year at the university, Amanda had shared her adventures with her mother. But Cassandra had never had any amusing anecdotes to beguile her daughter with. She had led a staid and well behaved life with darling Eddie, never straying until the previous fall day when Hugo had come to find her and make her give an account of why she had concealed Amanda’s existence from him for eighteen years. Now she had two escapades with which to regale her daughter, the wildly successful Anthony Newton campaign and the subsequent madcap antic of seducing Michael Flagg. The latter confession would be doubly delicious because she knew that Flagg had spanked Amanda, during her first visit to Random Point the previous autumn. She never dreamed that she and her daughter would share a play partner but knew that Amanda would find the entire situation fascinating.
Cassandra found Hope already at her command post in the office, answering email. The blonde beauty had her hair in one long, careless braid and was clad collegiately in a maroon and gray plaid skirt, a maroon polo sweater top, oxblood red penny loafers and ankle sox.
“What a cute outfit,” said Cassandra, coming in with her coffee.
“I have my first session today,” said Hope, looking up at her new boss with a smile. “Mr. Bartlett is coming in this afternoon. I just hope the school room furniture gets delivered this morning.”
“Mr. Bartlett is certainly eager,” said Cassandra. “I’ve heard he’s a hard session, though,” she added.
Hope grimaced, nodding, “That’s true! But he’s a big tipper.” She sighed. “I knew he’d be my first session. Didn’t I tell you he would?”
“What’s our dungeon situation? How many spaces are ready?”
“Look, I have it all here on the blueprint,” said Hope, getting a graphic file open on her computer. “The white spaces are the rooms that haven’t been finished yet, the gray ones are partially furnished but usable and the pink ones are complete.”
“That’s nice. Anthony will be impressed with this,” said Cassandra, noticing that there were only a few white spaces. One was for the exam room to come. Special furniture and equipment were to be ordered for that room after careful consideration.
“Dru is unpacking the library and arranging the books right now,” said Hope.
The noise of a large truck arriving outside brought them out to the front of the house. It was the modern gunmetal blue leather furniture from the Dutch firm, drop shipped from New York.
“I’m so happy,” said Hope to Cassandra as the deliveryman began unloading. “Now we can set up the terra cotta parlor!”
Cassandra went back to Hope’s computer to study the blueprint of the house again. As of that afternoon they would have many private spaces available for playing in. A parlor and the schoolroom were about to come together. The classic whipping post and stocks had been placed in Cape Cod, the airy corner room with windows on two sides, where Laura had painted an abstract beach on the walls. The remodeled loft was ready to play in. And two of the plushly decorated bedrooms were also fully squared away. Suddenly a text message appeared on Cassandra’s phone from Michael Flagg. “A lady will visit at noon. Put her in a room to wait.”
“Copy that,” Cassandra wrote back immediately, her heart jumping with excitement to hear from her new lover so soon.
In the next half hour the second furniture delivery arrived. Hope supervised the unloading and Cassandra was well pleased at the speed with which the club was being filled up with pleasant and comfortable things.
Jane Eliot arrived at the stroke of noon in a russet skirt and white sleeveless blouse, pumps and dark glasses, her medium length brown hair parted on the side and brushed back from her brow. She wore almost no make-up but looked very pretty and polished. Hope greeted her cheerfully from her command station, inwardly overjoyed that the first official customer of the club should be a lady.
“Hi Hope,” said Jane, quietly, as though she was afraid of being overheard. “I’m supposed to meet Michael here.”
“Someone is waiting for you, but it’s not Michael,” Hope disclosed.
“Not Michael?”
“No, it’s Marguerite’” said Hope in an undertone.
“You’re kidding, right?” Jane pulled off her sunglasses to stare at Hope, her chest contracting in a sudden rush of guilty anxiety.
Hope rose to conduct Jane to the newly furnished terra cotta salon. She opened the door for Jane then discreetly disappeared. Jane walked in to see Marguerite lightly perched on the arm of a blue leather sofa, smartly clad in a cream suit with a nipped waist, white shirt and beige on black four-inch stack heeled oxfords. As soon as Jane appeared, Marguerite folded her arms across her remarkable bosom and tossed her smooth, shiny light red hair back from her brow.
“Hello,” said Marguerite, in a not unfriendly manner, smiling faintly as though at an amusing situation.
“Hi,” said Jane, with a pounding heart, the blood rushing to her cheeks.
“Michael’s girl called in sick today last minute and he had to go open the tavern,” explained Marguerite, pleasantly, “so he asked me to meet you and take you to lunch in his place.”
“Oh!” Jane murmured. “Oh, great.”
“He told me he was going to show you around the club because he thought it might interest you. So I offered to come and look it over with you. Hope says a great deal of furniture has just been delivered, including these pieces,” said Marguerite, gesturing to the loveseats, sofas and deep chairs that filled the spacious, handsomely crown molded room. Jane looked about her.
“Beautiful,” said Jane, breathing in the leather-scented air.
“Come, let’s look at the dungeons,” said Marguerite, leading the way out of the room and down the hall. They looked into and walked around the rooms that already had play furniture in them. When they reached the one called Cape Cod, Marguerite closed the door behind them and leaned her back against it.
“It’s a lovely club, isn’t it?” Marguerite asked Jane.
“Oh, yes!”
“Anthony Newton saw fit to endow Random Point with this space, mainly so he and his friends would have an interesting new environment to come and play in, both with their partners and if they were being naughty, others,” said Marguerite.
“Really?” Jane said, looking with interest at the spanking bench and whipping post, set against the pale blues and sands of the shoreline on the walls.
“This would be a fun room to play in, wouldn’t it?” asked Marguerite.
“With the stocks, this room reminds me of the Scarlet Letter,” Jane agreed.
“It’s funny you should mention adultery,” said Marguerite.
“I didn’t mention adultery,” said Jane.
“You mentioned The Scarlet Letter.”
“Oh, that’s right.”
“No, that’s wrong.”
“I think I see where you’re going with this,” Jane replied uncomfortably. Marguerite folded her arms. “But, how did you find out?”
“Michael told me himself.”
“That surprises me,” said Jane.
“I know, it does seem unusual, but he was distraught and confused. Because you seem to have left him with the impression that he owes you a baby.”
“We’ll, we were engaged to be married and I was kind of counting on him to be the father of my children at one time.”
“Yes, but that was a long time ago, Jane, as you well know. Why did you not express this intense desire you now seem to have to procreate with him at any time during all those years?”
Jane didn’t have a good answer and hung her head.
“I’m not buying this biological clock fairy tale, Jane,” said Marguerite. ”You’re making this mischief out of sexual boredom and for no other reason.”
“Well you can blame yourself for that,” said Jane, her nerve returning a little as she realized Marguerite didn’t plan to slap her.
“Oh?”
“Yes, if you hadn’t invited me to the Venus Club dinner I wouldn’t have been so vividly reminded of what I’ve been missing.”
“You didn’t seem to want him very badly when you had him,” Marguerite observed, “as I recall you gave him up to me, Damaris and the scene at the time without so much as a fight.”
“Of course I wanted him, he was my man. I enjoyed sex with him. He could never deny that. But I was up against the glamor of the scene that you were offering him. And I was too stubborn to find out what it was really all about.”
“And then Hugo Sands enlightened you,” Marguerite recalled.
“Yes, and by that time it was or seemed too late to get Michael back,” said Jane.
“But now it doesn’t?”
“I’m not trying to get him back,” Jane protested, “I’m just having a little fun.”
“Fun, is it? Let me show you something,” said Marguerite, pulling a phone from an envelope purse she had been carrying under her arm and tapping it until a brutally adorable photo of she and Michael cuddling their baby girl appeared. This the redhead forced before Jane’s gaze.
Jane laughed, “Marguerite, don’t.”
“Listen, Jane, you have to stop this nonsense with Michael at once. The time is not right for that. I’m far too recently married to be comfortable sharing my husband.”
“I will,” said Jane sincerely.
“But there is a new piece of nonsense you ought to start at once. You need to start working at this club.”
“Work here? Me?”
“Yes, my love. And you will be my love from now on.”
“But what would I do here? And why?”
“What you’d do would be to play. Why? Because you’re restless.”
“But what about Marnie?”
“I’m sure she’d be happier with you working here than having a passionate love affair with your ex.”
As this conversation between Marguerite and Jane was taking place, Hope Lawrence happened to wander out the kitchen door into the back garden with its own beaten path leading into the woods. It was a warm afternoon beneath a cloudless blue sky and the trees were alive with soft summer sounds. Hope was about to light a joint before addressing the rather large task of making sure each of the playrooms and bedrooms were amply supplied with a set of paddles, straps, floggers and restraints when she noticed a bit of movement at the back of the house and espied young Dru Baxter standing at the very northwest corner, under one of the windows of the Cape Cod room, where the two visiting women happened to be. Hope put away her joint without lighting it and crept a little closer, observing with surprise that her trusted bus boy from the coffee shop, whom she had known, liked and respected for several years, appeared to be actually watching Marguerite and Jane, with his hand stuck down his jeans.
Going quickly and silently into the house again, Hope came back out just seconds later, leading Cassandra behind her by the hand, both taking care not to make a sound. They approached Dru so stealthily and quickly that he was surprised in his peeping before having time to even pull his hands from his pants. The women were upon him and he stood speechless and flushing with embarrassment before them. They spoke softly and firmly to him, Hope taking him by the arm and pulling him away from the window, back towards the garden, well out of earshot of their guests.
“Dru, what the hell?” asked Hope angrily.
“We’re you spying on Marguerite and Jane?” Asked Cassandra.
“I was curious,” Dru admitted, for within the room, Marguerite had begun to show Jane how the various pieces of furniture could work in a spanking scene and the tall, voluptuous redhead’s gestures were fascinating to the young man who had once had such a large crush on the book store owner and was favored with her exquisite attentions on several occasions. Her employee had charmed Marguerite, for he had worked at the bookstore for several years and was well known to her for his cheerful affability and worshipful devotion. Marguerite had rewarded him one season by making his submissive dreams come true, giving him a wonderful strapping and then, because she was in just the right mood, allowing him to possess her physically. The result had been bliss for Dru and perplexity for Marguerite, when she realized that she was subsequently pregnant and that the father could have been Dru, Michael Flagg or Anthony Newton. It had been rather a busy month for Marguerite, the month after splitting up with her first husband, Malcolm Branwell. Subsequently, Michael had taken a stray strand of hair from baby Felina’s pillow and had it tested to prove beyond a doubt that she was his daughter. But this hadn’t stopped Anthony Newton from generously endowing Marguerite with a nanny for the duration of Felina’s toddlerhood. No one argued with this. The addition of Belinda Cowper to the household had allowed both Michael and Marguerite to tend their respective businesses as usual. Belinda was the sister of Anthony’s English driver and personal assistant Dennis and she was every bit as pleasant and efficient an employee.
“This cannot go unpunished,” declared Hope. Cassandra strove to conceal her surprise at her assistant’s remark, thinking, “I guess I can’t put off the man spanking thing indefinitely. Might as well get a little practice in.”
“We should take him in the woods and give him a good switching!” Hope suggested, her wide blue eyes full of excitement.
“We’ll each take a hand so he doesn’t get away,” said Cassandra, taking Dru by his wrist. Hope got on his other side, grabbed his pleasantly muscular upper arm and they began to pull the blond boy into the woods.
“I got a switching once from Hugo,” confided Cassandra to Hope, as though Dru wasn’t even there. “I hated it. It made me cry. It was in the woods too.”
“I had exactly the same experience with David the year we moved here. It was outside the cottage and three strokes had me in tears,” said Hope.
Both women noticed that Dru had not said a word more, though he was blushing furiously. Hope’s eyes and Cassandra’s eyes traveled down to Dru’s jeans, just below his belt and at the same time noticed his burgeoning erection.
“You’re lucky Miss Cassandra doesn’t fire you,” said Hope. Dru lowered his eyes and murmured, “I know.”
“My only concern is that he might enjoy it. And then we’d be rewarding instead of punishing bad form,” said Cassandra.
“Oh, he may think he’ll enjoy it, but he won’t,” promised Hope, stopping them before a fallen tree trunk.
“Put your hands on the tree, lean forward and stick your bottom out,” Cassandra instructed, “while we go find a switch.” Dru obeyed without question and the pretty women began to search the ground.
“I suppose it should be me?” Cassandra said softly to Hope.
“Yes,” Hope replied. “But then me. We’ll each give him three swats.”
“Oh look,” said Hope, kneeling on the forest floor to gather long, thin twigs, “here’s a bunch all around the same size. If you had something to tie them with we could make a version of a birch rod.”
Cassandra spied a length of mulberry velvet ribbon threaded through Hope’s braid and deftly extracted it, saying, “Tie it with this. Birch rods I like!”
“Me too,” Hope agreed, “as long as whoever is using it isn’t too hard. Which reminds me, we’d better make this quick. Mr. Bartlett will be here soon and if I’m not ready he’ll make me suffer for it.”
They returned to Dru, who was half leaning over the log and half looking nervously back over his shoulder.
“Of course, we should make him take his jeans down but I don’t want to see his rude boy hard-on, do you, Miss Cassandra?” asked Hope, pushing Dru back down over the tree trunk and holding him down by his trim waist.
“No, I can do without that,” the mistress of the house agreed, taking up the makeshift rod and aiming carefully to swat the nineteen year old soon to be college sophomore directly across the middle of his jeans clad seat. Dru cried out in surprise at the sharp, stinging, penetrating stroke that imparted such a painful kiss to his denim covered bottom. It was a trim, muscular, somewhat jutting backside and Cassandra had no doubt the downy skin beneath the pants was lily white with a tinge of pink coming up quickly in the wake of the lash.
“Good,” Hope observed Dru’s shudder, “he felt that, you can tell.” Dru groaned in fearful anticipation of the next two swats, for he had overheard that each of his adorable persecutors planned to administer three. The next two strokes fell quickly and harder. Cassandra did not think herself capable of real cruelty to the handsome boy, but his respect for her as the head of the club was at stake and besides, she knew very well that most boys in the scene could take and indeed wanted sterner punishments than their female counterparts might. This time Dru strove to manfully muffle his cries. Cassandra handed the rod to Hope and they switched positions.
Now Hope got behind Dru and took aim just slightly below the strokes that Cassandra had placed crosswise upon Dru’s backside.
“How dare you peep at our clients at play?” Hope demanded, laying down the first swat, twice as severely as Cassandra had done. This much stricter assault summoned forth a heavy grunt of pain from the no longer stoic Dru, who looked back at Hope reproachfully over one shoulder.
“Back in position, young man!” ordered Hope, raising her slender arm once more. “We reposed our trust in you and you betrayed it,” continued Hope, striking once more with the same enthusiasm. Dru flinched but didn’t cry out. “You’re lucky we don’t drag you back before Marguerite and Jane to let them express their indignation as well,” said Hope, “but it would be bad policy to reveal such inexcusably indiscreet behavior to our very first customers ever.”
“I’m so sorry,” Dru moaned, then tensed for the final swat. Hope raised her arm and let go with full force, this final stroke eliciting a full-throated cry from the fair-haired miscreant.
“All right, then,” said Cassandra, pulling Dru up, “run back to the house and return to your tasks and we’ll mention this no more.”
Dru looked at them both shyly, rubbing his hurt bottom through his jeans then impulsively seized Cassandra’s hand, kissed it and then ran away back to the house.
Hope grinned at Cassandra and said, “You did well, my goddess. Shall we return now?” They walked back to the kitchen garden arm in arm.