Master of the House (23 page)

He patted my bottom, held me tight into him for a breathless moment, then broke away from me.

‘Are you ready?’ he whispered. ‘Are you ready to be my submissive tonight?’

‘Any night you like,’ I said.

He cupped my cheek.

‘I’m already proud of you,’ he said. ‘Whatever happens, you know that, don’t you?’

‘I want to make you prouder. I love you.’

We kissed again.

‘Show me,’ he murmured.

He turned me around and nudged me out of the room, walking behind me with his hand on my shoulder.

At the staircase down to the coffee shop, he came to my side and we descended arm in arm, like stately nobles sweeping our way into the royal court.

The shop had been substantially altered. All the tables and chairs were gone and the walls were hung with garlands. A chandelier had been fixed to the central light fitting and the light was glittering and dappled, falling on a growing press of beautifully attired bodies. In the corner by the door sat a harpist – apparently she played an arpeggio every time a new guest or group of guests crossed the threshold.

It all looked terribly civilised. People raked their eyes over us, some interested, some indifferent, then returned to their drinks and conversations.

Joss bowed low, prompting me into a clumsy curtsy, then he shifted behind me and kissed my neck, his hand creeping down the front of my corset in a very blatant and erotically charged manner until I was afraid he would open the skirts in front of everyone.

Nobody was being this amorous yet and I almost bucked him off me, but I managed to shut my eyes and let myself drift into it.

‘I say, what passion,’ said a close bystander. ‘We’ve only just got here and you can’t get your hands off her. Not that I’m surprised.’

‘This is her first public event,’ said Joss, tucking me into the crook of his arm and taking a pair of tall flutes from a circulating tray.

I nudged him – he shouldn’t be drinking – and he handed one of the glasses to the man who’d spoken, the other to me.

‘I prefer to keep a clear head,’ he explained. ‘Is there …?’

Another tray containing pretend champagne appeared as if by magic – sparkling peach juice, he diagnosed, after sniffing at it.

‘You’re probably very wise,’ said the other man. ‘No sub should have to tolerate a drunken dom. Isn’t that right, Charlotte?’

I was surprised to hear that he was accompanied – I had presumed him to be alone. But my mask had made it difficult to look down, which was where his companion was located. On her knees. On the end of a leash which, now I looked closely, I could see wrapped round the man’s hand that wasn’t occupied with the champagne flute.

Her head, in a cat mask, was bowed, and she wore no more than a black velvet bow tie, some glittery nipple pasties, a tiny black sequinned thong and very high-heeled shoes.

How she was able to go about in public like this was enough to make my mind reel. All the other submissive women were dressed similarly to me. I was curious to ask our new acquaintance why he had chosen to flout the dress code, but Joss had warned me to speak only when spoken to, and it was probably the wisest course.

‘Yes, sir,’ she said softly.

‘Are you agreeing or disagreeing with me? I’m not sure,’ said the man teasingly.

‘Agreeing, of course, sir.’

‘Good.’ He yanked at the leash. ‘Come on, kitty cat. I think I know someone who wants to pet you.’

She followed him on her hands and knees. I watched her pert bottom cheeks wiggle off until she was subsumed by the crowd, then turned back to Joss.

‘Don’t go getting any ideas,’ I said.

He pouted.

‘You’d look so lovely …’ He drained his glass, replaced it on a tray and snapped to attention, his whole body straightening and stiffening in a trice. ‘And besides – that tone isn’t appropriate here, my dear. We’ll have due deference from now on, or that public spanking will come sooner than I’d planned. Let’s go and be wallflowers for a little while – I think a soupçon of voyeurism will ease you into the scene.’

The room was lined with red plush seats. I made to sit down beside Joss, but he grabbed me around the waist and pulled me roughly on to his lap instead.

Thus ensconced, with my skirts parted behind so that my bare bottom rested on Joss’s immaculate trousers, not that anyone could see, I watched the revelry from a safe distance.

It was early, so people were presumably warming up and partaking of Dutch courage in its bubbly form, but even so, some were further advanced in the game than others. For every three or four little groups of politely conversing masked people, there was a group who had moved on.

The one closest to us consisted of a young man on his knees in leather trousers and nothing else – not even shoes. Another man stood holding the shirt he had just ripped off him, sipping champagne with airy nonchalance, while the kneeling man kissed his jutting leather-bound crotch. Both of them were fit and handsome and I found myself leaning further forwards for a better view. The kneeling man seemed a little frantic, mashing his face into the standing man’s bulge, but the standing man seemed to be enjoying the pretence of ignoring what was going on. Instead, he hailed a woman in the crowd by raising his glass, and she came over to join them.

I couldn’t hear their words, but they seemed to mock the kneeling man. The woman carried a riding crop and with it she tapped the sub’s hands, which were clasped behind his back.

Then she started to thwack it against his leathery bottom while he continued to rub and shake his head against his master’s crotch.

‘Do you like this?’ murmured Joss into my ear. He slid a hand under my skirt and ran his fingers up and down my inner thigh with a maddening lightness of touch. ‘You do, don’t you? I can feel the heat all the way down here.’ He patted the tender skin.

I tensed, feeling that he was going to touch me intimately right here in this room full of strangers. Did I want him to? Or not? I think I did, and that was the most shameful realisation of all.

‘It’s nice,’ I breathed, a little lamely.
Nice?
Where was my thesaurus when I needed it?

‘Does it turn you on? Hmm?’

‘Yes,’ I whispered.

‘I’m glad you admitted that, or I’d have had to check with my own fingers.’ He moved his hand higher.

My breathing grew shallower, my head lighter.

‘You are mine,’ he said, dark and low.

In front of me, the two dominant players conferred and seemed to reach an agreement. The male reached down, grabbed a handful of his sub’s hair and yanked him to his feet. The dazed-looking sub staggered after them, presumably looking for a more appropriate venue to continue the scene.

‘Where are they going?’ I asked.

Joss’s fingers stopped at the very crease of my thigh and pressed down.

‘Any number of places,’ he said. ‘There are private and public dungeons, a school room, a medical room, a huge boudoir full of curtained divans … any of those places. Or maybe they’ll do it in the road.’

I laughed.

‘I mean, the corridors,’ he amended. ‘Or on the stairs. This room is the only place where explicit sex acts are forbidden.’

‘I thought what that lad was doing was fairly explicit.’

‘Only if his dom had unbuttoned. That would have been different.’

‘And … what you’re doing to me now?’

I gasped. Joss was stroking up and down the outer lips of my pussy.

‘As long as nobody can see … anything goes,’ he said, biting my earlobe.

I tried to look demure, which was difficult, especially when my gaze landed on three buxom women engaged in a group hug that involved very smoochy, very tonguey kisses and a lot of hands under skirts.

The champagne was doing its work of knocking down the walls of inhibition very nicely.

‘Have you ever kissed a girl?’ Joss asked me, still moving that mesmeric fingertip up and down and around.

‘Only for a laugh,’ I managed to reply. ‘As a teenager. Before I met you. Oh, God, Joss.’

He had crept inwards, and was mere sticky millimetres away from my clit.

‘I’d like to order you to do it tonight. I’d like to watch your little hot mouth being kissed and tongued by a dominatrix. I’d like to watch her lift your skirts and press her breasts into yours and make you suck her nipples while she fingered you.’

‘Unh.’ I couldn’t say much more. I was streaming wet and my shameless clit was having a party on Joss’s finger.

‘You little horndog, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’d like to feel her fingers up inside you. You’d like to get on your knees for her and lick her while she pulled your hair and called you every name under the sun. Perhaps I could join in … perhaps I could spank you while you were licking her. Make sure you did the job properly. Then perhaps you could suck me while she had you with a strap-on … Oh, Lucy, Lucy, Lucy. Dear me.’

For I had come, twisting and moaning on his lap, my eyes shut against the awful thought that people might be watching. Surely they would guess from my burning cheeks, my open mouth, my sudden slackness of posture.

Too late.

He laughed into my hair, his breath heating my ear.

‘Bad girl,’ he taunted, tapping my clit with a disapproving fingertip. ‘Did you ask permission? No, you didn’t. I can’t sit here watching any more. Come on. I’m taking you to be spanked.’

I still couldn’t form words, so no protest fell from my lips. I followed him mutely as he pulled me by the wrist through the crowds. A couple of knowing smiles met my eye, but I felt emboldened by my mask to ignore them. Could they smell me as I passed through? They probably could.

All the way to the stairs, I was too preoccupied by the enormity of what I had just done – let myself be fingered to orgasm in a packed ballroom – to think of what was to come.

We went down into a torchlit corridor, weaving our way through bodies in all states of undress and congress. One couple were at it, hammer and tongs, on the bottom two steps. The night was young, I thought with a twinge of judgement. Shouldn’t they be pacing themselves?

We turned into an open doorway, the second of a long line, and joined the end of a queue that seemed to have formed.

‘What’s this? Santa’s Grotto?’ I whispered, but Joss simply shook his head, shushed me, and pointed to the goings-on at the other end of the room.

A woman was strapped over a kind of folding leather chair thing, her bare bottom high in the air while the costume skirts were bunched up at the side of her hips. I couldn’t see her face, just her bum and the backs of her legs.

On one side of her stood a man kitted out like a mediaeval executioner, all in black with a black leather mask over his head. On the other, one of the suited and booted Roissy-styled men.

‘What do you choose?’ asked the executioner.

‘She needs the cane,’ said the dom.

There was applause and some whistling from the queue, and from a separate group who stood to one side, intending only to watch.

Wait. If they were the watchers, then we were the punters? I was queuing up to get spanked! As if a public spanking wasn’t humiliating enough, I had to stand in a queue for it. The thought reduced me to a quivering mess of embarrassment. But it was also a huge turn-on. I had to wait here, meekly and humbly, until it was my turn to get what was coming to me. And everyone could see me here. They would know at a glance that it wasn’t Joss who was going to get bent over and dealt with.

‘Joss,’ I whispered, plucking at his shirt sleeve.

‘It’s “sir” here,’ he replied sternly, while he could be overheard. Then he bent his legs a little, came down to my level and whispered, ‘You can do this, Lulu.’

‘I know,’ I said. I wanted to. I was beyond thrilled by the prospect. But I was scared as well. ‘Just … I’m a bit nervous.’

‘That’s natural,’ he said. He put his arms around me and stood with me wrapped up in front of him while the show continued.

God, the cane looked horrendous! But the noise it made was pure sex, swishing down and landing with a wince-inducing
thwick
on the poor woman’s soft rounds.

Perhaps it didn’t hurt as much as I thought, because she barely made a sound in protest. She was strapped down, of course, but there didn’t seem to be a lot in the way of strenuous escape attempts going on either. So perhaps ‘poor woman’ wasn’t the right term. Perhaps it was ‘lucky woman’.

Lucky woman to have each stroke firmly laid in a white bar before it reddened into a long welt. Lucky woman to hear the applause and laughter of the onlookers as she suffered. Lucky woman to have this memory to play with for the rest of her life. Above all, lucky woman to be facing away from the crowd.

The next victim was not so fortunate. He was positioned with his face to the crowd, his wrists cuffed and suspended from a hook while he took a whipping across his back and buttocks from a very short but very confident woman in a leather catsuit. She stood on a footstool to reach her target effectively. I couldn’t decide which was the more worth watching – her face, with its clear satisfaction in a job well done, or his, in its reverential anguish, determined to bear all for his mistress.

The lash really frightened me, more than the cane, and Joss seemed to pick up on my tension.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I won’t use anything you can’t take.’

‘How do you know what I can take?’ I asked, mesmerised by the sweat dripping into the submissive man’s eyes.

‘I don’t. But the best way is to work up slowly.’

Two more came before us, and these took lighter spankings, amid much laughter and squealing. I was relieved. I didn’t want to show myself up as the token lightweight among serious masochists. The last couple switched, both taking ten strokes of the strap, stepping down from the stage with matching red bottoms and wide grins.

‘Sweet,’ I said, but my lips were rubbery with fear and I could taste the seafood salad in the back of my throat. I hoped it wasn’t about to make a reappearance.

‘Up you go.’ Joss nudged me between my shoulder blades and I stepped uncertainly up the steps to the platform. He kept his hand around my upper arm in case, I thought, I bolted. I must admit, it crossed my mind. There was bright backlighting in my eyes and two black-clad figures standing by a big chest to the side of me.