Bertie and the Kinky Politician (12 page)

‘I have to say it did look amusing.'

‘Things like that only happen to me,' he complained with a sigh. That was true enough – she sincerely hoped he had more luck with Britain's nuclear trigger. ‘Bertie's very inquisitive, isn't he?'

‘Yes, he is.' Celeste bent to tighten laces and jerk straps a notch tighter before snapping one pair of handcuffs around his ankles and the other around his wrists, his arms settling in the small of his back, fingers curled like black claws. He struggled briefly to test the extent of his bondage, but then Celeste brought her riding crop down on his buttocks without warning, the flat crack of leather on leather instantly answered by a startled squeal of pain and shock.

Too stunned to speak, James fought to contain the searing line of fire planted across his seat. He jerked spasmodically and screwed his eyes shut against the tears as the burning peaked before slowly subsiding into a wonderfully effusive glowing.

Jesus, that felt good!

All the problems and dilemmas at work, the careful mediation between pompous civil servants and belligerent staff officers, the tiresome compromises and endless massaging of egos, the political machinations and back-biting in Cabinet, all of it simply melted away, purged by the exquisite sensation flooding through his body. Serenity descended on James like a balmy mist floating down from heaven itself.

Celeste sat on the sofa, composing herself. She placed her booted feet together and tapped the polished tips with her crop. ‘Come! These need cleaning,' she announced primly.

‘Yes, Mistress.' With an occasional creak and rattle, James levered himself forward on his belly like a great stiff slug and kissed one toe with profound reverence. A pink tongue wriggled out of the hole in his helmet and skipped over the instep before running up and down the heel. The cream leather was already immaculate – Celeste had never worn them outside the house – but the ritual was crucially important, reinforcing the nature of their curious but profoundly fulfilling relationship.

Celeste watched negligently while each boot was lovingly licked. James performed his task with joyous humility, but was aware of the limits placed on his attentive osculation. Everything up to the calf was, as always, his territory, but anything above remained strictly out of bounds. He glimpsed up at her shapely legs. The glorious mysteries found between those soft thighs would always be denied him, but no matter. James was utterly content with the situation. He idolised Celeste with every fibre of his body. She enchanted and bewitched his soul, yet he had no desire to be anything other than her slave. In turn, she found his attentive submission, humour and high pain threshold rare qualities and perfect for her own unique desires.

Celeste massaged his face with her feet. He rolled on to his back and lay supine, arms and legs still bound. The smooth tan soles rested on his cheeks and forehead, blocking his vision. She noticed the silhouette of a splendidly stout erection tenting the leather over his belly and tapped at it with the crop. James started violently and one of her feet slipped from his face.

‘Clumsy!' she muttered in mock irritability. ‘I'll have to bind you properly. Get the harness!'

He crawled across the floor, inching forward by twisting from side to side, and gripped the writhing mass of strappery in his teeth before returning, dragging the harness behind him to lay it at her feet like an obedient spaniel presenting a stick. She took the harness from him and pressed down on the back of his head with one foot, squashing his nose against the floor. ‘Tell me, why should I bother to use this harness?'

‘Mistress, I might not be able to help myself moving, so I need to be restrained properly. Tightly.'

‘Well, I must confess this does look good on you. I do like the neatness of the straps and the way they divide up the target area. It helps me to be more accurate.'

‘The patterns you draw are aesthetically pleasing,' agreed James, sniffing her parquet. He recalled the slovenly stripes of some of his former acquaintances. There was no artistry from a working girl – the marks on his bum sometimes looked like the scribblings of a drunken spider.

Or a Jackson Pollock!

‘I agree it's important you can't move,' she said. He heard the jingle of the handcuff keys as they skittered across the polished floor. Celeste had tossed them into a far corner. ‘Fetch!' she ordered. ‘Then we'll see about getting you properly restrained.'

James found his head released and set off once again, shuffling forwards in a serpentine manner. Bertie watched him pass by. ‘Fetch!' he repeated faultlessly.

‘I am,' muttered James, throwing a sideways glance at the macaw perched above him.

‘Hush, Bertie,' murmured Celeste. James retrieved the keys with his teeth and returned, gazing in adoration at her leather-shrouded form. The hood framed her face, accentuating her intent stare and flushed cheeks. Copper hair sprouted from the funnel at her crown like a burnished fountain before cascading in glorious waves over one shoulder. She looked magnificent beyond measure. No woman could be more self-assured, more confident, more powerful, more puissant. She was a goddess and he worshipped her without question.

Celeste removed the handcuffs and sat back, one gloved hand draped over the arm of the sofa. James knelt to kiss it humbly before slipping into the harness. He secured his legs together at ankle, knee and thigh before buckling the waist and chest belts and fastening a deep collar around his neck. The broad bands crimped his leather suit. Celeste waited until he had finished, then turned him around, took his arms and fed them through a series of loops behind his back. The buckles were tightened with a jerk. She uncoiled her bullwhip, stepped back a pace, and struck him across the rump with no mean vigour.

James shrieked. Impressively.

Bertie started at the sudden sound and watched him crumple to the floor. Fortunately, the house was detached. Their kind of foreplay tended to be sprinkled with such auditory outbursts and these would certainly have attracted neighbourly attention had Celeste lived in a tower block.

‘Now we can't have you making a noise, can we.'

‘N-no, Mistress,' he panted querulously. ‘Please, I beg you to silence me.'

‘As you wish.' Celeste extracted a ferociously large gag from the portmanteau, knelt beside him and forced it into his mouth, poppers snapping to hold it in place. A blindfold covered his eyes. Now totally helpless, he jerked and writhed on the floor under the accurate rain of blows extravagantly applied by his beloved mistress, breath rasping. She wielded the whip with skill and verve, planting its stinging tip all over his bottom.

And all the while his excitement grew.

Bertie watched the ritual with casual interest, noting with approval Celeste's enthusiastic chastisement. She dominated The Kneeling Man in much the same way he dominated Sebastian, and as such her actions seemed quite natural to him. It appeared his mum was experiencing no difficulty with her guest and would not be requiring his help again, so he sipped a little water and settled down for a nap, flinching in unison with James at the crack of well-aimed rawhide on leathered buttock.

Presently, judging that her slave had suffered enough, Celeste tossed the whip onto the sofa, attached a leash to his collar and jerked him towards the door. His sinuous movements enchanted her. Writhing like a snake on his belly, he strained from side to side, puffing and panting like a bronchitic steam locomotive with a leaky boiler. They meandered out of the salon and across the hall to the cellar door. She slid James down the wooden stairs head first, holding on to his ankles to stop him falling uncontrollably, each undignified bump accompanied with a heavily muffled grunt. From there it was only a short crawl to their goal.

The wardrobe stood tall and broad, a monument of Victorian confidence in solid English oak, ornate and impossibly ugly, with Gothic influences in its soaring columns and grotesquely intricate carvings. To James, it was a dark box of mystery and delight.

Celeste took the key from a hook beside the stairs and unlocked the full-length double doors. The insides were heavily padded. Even the doors were covered in thick panels of buttoned black leather. A sweet aroma wafted out. She dragged James to his feet, reversed him into the welcoming darkness and secured him upright with a great host of supple straps. He struggled a little, as he always did, but it was just a token effort – he would have just as happily jumped inside of his own accord. Celeste folded a pair of long leather flaps together over his feet, joined them with a zip and tugged slowly upwards. The flaps enclosed James in a cocoon from toe to neck rather like a bizarre sleeping bag, snugging tightly to his form, wrapping, concealing, submerging.

‘Comfortable?'

‘Mmmmph!'

‘Is that a yes?'

‘Mrrmmph!'

‘Or a no?'

‘Mmm! Grruummm!'

Celeste chuckled at the little interchange. The bag was checked again, then she slipped a matching hood over his head and tied off a drawstring, leaving just an open circular ring over his nostrils for breathing.

How splendid he looked!

Celeste's compulsion to place men into positions of respectful subservience had grown inexorably over the years. She never doubted the path she'd taken, never felt for one moment her pursuits were in any way aberrant. Her desires remained an abiding passion, introducing structure and meaning into her life. It was a calling which continued to give her endless pleasure and each time she mummified James she experienced a deeply spiritual satisfaction. The beauty of her creation engaged all her senses; the aesthetic symmetry of his gently bulging body, snug and secure in its womb-like enclosure, the accompanying creak of tensioned strapping, and the sweet, earthy odour of warm leather wafting gently around the cellar.

The double doors swung shut. Bolts slid home. The key turned with a well-oiled click. She hung it on the hook again, took one last look at the silent wardrobe and its blissfully contented package, then slowly climbed the stairs. Her breasts felt heavy. Heat between her legs betrayed a profound excitement. Nimble fingers promised repeated pleasures. Thank heavens for Purple Pippa, her intimate buzzing buddy.

‘Good night, James,' she said softly, pausing on the threshold, then turned out the light and locked the cellar door.

Chapter Seven

‘Will you stop your damned fidgeting!' grumbled Coberley. He sat in the back of a nondescript white Transit van staring at a sophisticated military thermal imaging monitor. Pritchard was barely able to shuffle past him in the cramped interior. ‘This thing is tricky enough to operate without you bouncing around looking for your stupid sandwiches.'

‘I'm sure I put them down the back of the seats.' Pritchard finally squeezed behind his partner and, stooping to avoid banging his head on the roof, reversed himself to sit on the Elsan chemical toilet bolted in one corner. He looked around, continuing his search, but there weren't too many places of concealment inside the cluttered vehicle. Without much hope, he picked up a cardboard box and rummaged inside amongst the jemmies, Slim Jims, latex gloves, Tasers, and CS gas canisters, generating furtive rustling sounds in the dimmed red light. ‘Goddammit, how can they just disappear? Are they by your feet?'

‘No,' replied Coberley without moving.

‘You didn't even look!' Pritchard objected peevishly.

‘Give me a break, Bob. I'm actually trying to work here.'

The two men had spent all day and most of the evening parked a few hundred yards down the road from Celeste's house, so little wonder they were finally getting on each others' nerves. Greenwich did that to some people. Neither liked using the van much, although both had to admit it often proved to be extremely handy as a mobile base of operations when out conducting their nefarious deeds.

Strange scarlet shapes floated before his eyes. The actual detector head transmitting the colourful image had been stuck on the salon patio doors earlier that morning while Celeste was still asleep. The tiny probe was encased in a protective blob of silicone superbly camouflaged to resemble a dollop of bird droppings, so it was no surprise the device was designated with the appropriate MoD acronym, CRAP – Counter-surveillance Remote All-weather Probe. The probe was easily sensitive enough to detect a thermal gradient through the double glazing and curtains inside, converting a heat signature into a graduated spectrum of colour. Cooler temperatures appeared in blue and green, warmer in yellows and reds, and this rainbowed image gave them a clear view of what was happening inside the salon, while an astonishingly sensitive micro-microphone picked up any sound.

The CRAP was supplemented by UDDERS, a Ultra-high Definition Digital Electronic Reconnaissance System comprising a powerful night vision camera lodged under a leafy shrub on the edge of the lawn. Operated remotely from Coberley's control panel, UDDERS provided an excellent overview of the rear of the property via an ultra-high definition digital signal. He sat at the cramped console fingering a joystick gingerly. The camera responded to his commands and played slowly from window to window before returning to the larger full-length double doors leading into the salon. Although pitch black outside, it, too, was still capable of providing an extraordinarily sharp image. With the camera outside and the ingeniously disguised probe covering the interior, Coberley was satisfied he had all angles covered, and everything CRAP and UDDERS saw was digitally stored on a hard drive at his elbow, ready for later analysis if required.

The grubby white Transit, despite its scruffy appearance, had nonetheless been tweaked by some serious petrol-heads, with extensive carbon fibre bulletproofing, big fat tyres, upgraded suspension and brakes, Kevlar racing clutch and a supercharger the size of a beach-ball strapped to the bored-out, nitrous-boosted engine, a combination of which provided performance straight from the Scalded Cat Institute of Motoring. Although almost new, the van had been expertly “distressed” to help it blend in more with its urban surroundings. Darkened rear windows fitted with armoured one-way glass allowed the occupants to see out while at the same time discouraging external inquisitiveness, and a number of small projections spaced along each side panel might have looked like the former fixings of advertising signs but were, in fact, a combination of fish-eye camera lenses and nozzles for spraying tear gas. The interior, although uncomfortably cramped for the operators, was fully equipped with all the latest real-time surveillance and satellite communication hardware the advanced technical sections of GCHQ could provide. In addition to the Elsan, of course. Some things never change.