To Seek a Master (12 page)

By the time she’d finished the dining room was open, allowing her to enjoy a gourmet meal at his expense, including oysters and a half lobster washed down with Champagne, sticky toffee pudding and several cups of liqueur coffee. By then her tummy was a hard round ball beneath her dress and
her
head was spinning, while her emotions had finally come back, bringing her to the edge of tears.

Not wanting anybody to see her cry, she made her way back to the room, where she threw herself down on the bed. Her tears came immediately, hot and choking as she gave in to her hurt, but also soothing, until at last she began to feel that she was being silly. Another drink seemed to be in order, and there turned out to be a bottle of Champagne in the minibar. She opened it, sipping the sharp effervescent wine as she undressed and washed.

She had brought a baby-doll to wear to bed, but couldn’t bear to get into it when it had been chosen for his pleasure, so pulled on a baggy top and a pair of knickers instead, before slipping into bed with the bottle at her side and
Taken to Turkey
to distract her from her thoughts. The story was almost at its climax, with Mark Frobisher threatening to drop Lord Jasper Mauleverer from the old city walls if he didn’t reveal Evangeline’s fate.

Laura had come to picture Chris as the hero, but now switched, thinking of him as Lord Jasper and earnestly wishing Mark Frobisher would drop him. Being a clean cut, English sort of hero, Frobisher hauled Lord Jasper in once he’d found out what he needed to know and made for the harem of Mustapha bin Yunus. The pace was picking up, and with it Laura’s attention, although it was getting a little difficult to focus on the page, with the words splitting and reforming in the most annoying manner. She forced herself to concentrate, thrilling to the description of Mark Frobisher demolishing scimitar waving guards with his bare fists and tearing away the curtains across the harem entrance …

… with a single, convulsive jerk of his muscles, to stand four-square beneath the high arch like some avenging
angel
of the Old Testament, his mighty fists bunched to strike down any opponent who dared to come against him, and yet the sight that met his ice-blue eyes came near to unmanning him.

Across the room sat Mustapha bin Yunus, naked but for a loin-cloth of turquoise silk, his great gelatinous bulk quivering with laughter, a goblet of beaten gold clasped in one hand and the rich red wine of sun-kissed Anatolia running down his blubbery chins. In his other hand he held a long whip of plaited leather, the tip an adder’s tongue that whistled and snapped as he applied it to the voluptuous target made by the delectable dusky derrière of one of a line of unfortunate concubines. She was one of five such girls in a row along a wide bench, each as naked as the day she was born and kneeling in a pose so lewd, so redolent of the Turk’s unbridled debauchery, that Mark’s hand moved to shield his eyes for the sake of decency before he remembered where he was and the dangers that faced him.

The girl against whose succulent, rotund flesh the whip had just snapped was a dusky beauty born of India’s jungle south, her neighbour an African wench as dark as ebony, the third an olive-skinned succubus of old Greece, the fourth a dainty yellow-hued daughter of the furthest east, and the fifth – the fifth was more beauteous still, her body a symphony in feminine delight, her luxurious tresses as golden as the midday sun, her skin as pale and smooth as Devon cream save only where three whip welts marred her perfection. The fifth girl – her pose no less lewd than the others – was Evangeline Tarrington.

Laura closed the book, blinking in a vain effort to make her eyes focus properly. She knew she was drunk, very drunk, and
that
seemed an excellent excuse for her being so horny despite everything that had happened. In fact it was good, because it meant she didn’t need Chris Drake, who was a two timing bastard and didn’t deserve her, or Hazel Manston-Jones, or anybody else. He was a rat, a pig, a snake, and it was just as well that they’d been interrupted before he could give her what had become such a special need: a good, firm spanking. Not that she’d gone without, because she had been spanked, spanked hard and by another woman, a taller, slimmer, stronger woman, just the sort of woman to dish out a well-deserved punishment. Maybe she’d even deserved it, in a sense.

‘No. I’m not going to do that.’

She had spoken aloud, shocked by the path her thoughts had begun to take. Quickly she told herself that she hadn’t deserved it at all, that in fact it had been unfair. After all, she hadn’t known that Chris and Miss Manston-Vicious-Bitch were an item, and would never have allowed him to have her if she’d realised. It was unfair, grossly unfair, but she’d been spanked anyway and there was something horribly compelling about that very injustice. She knew what it was too, the added sense of indignation at being punished unfairly, which made the experience so much stronger. It had been bad enough to be helpless in another woman’s grip with her bare bottom showing, let alone to be spanked, but the knowledge that it had been completely unfair was the final straw.

Tears of consternation and self-pity had begun to well up in Laura’s eyes, but her hand was on her tummy, her fingertips beneath the waistband of her knickers. She tried to stop herself, imagining the scene from
Taken to Turkey
instead, and how Evangeline would have felt, kneeling naked at one end of a row of girls, her bottom lifted and open to the lecherous gaze of the grotesque Mustapha as she was whipped. It was good,
an
appalling humiliating situation fit only for her darkest, most private fantasies, and yet compared with what had happened just hours before, on that same bed, it was nothing.

She gave in, too drunk and too highly aroused to resist. Her knickers came down, but not off, pushed to her ankles in the same way her bikini pants had been earlier. Even the tension of the cotton between her legs felt exquisite, and she was arching her back in pleasure as her top came up to bare her breasts even as the tears began to trickle down her face. Her knees came wide, her fingers delved into the warm sensitive crease of her sex and she began to masturbate.

Her bottom still felt a little tender, a sensation she’d been doing her best to ignore ever since her spanking, but which she now needed badly. She needed it stuck up too, the way she’d been done, and quickly pushed the bedclothes down to expose her body. Turning onto her front, she spread herself out, her knickers taut between her ankles, her bottom slightly lifted, her face and breasts pushed into the now tangled sheets.

Again her fingers found her sex, teasing as she played the scene through in her head; trying to run, tripping over her own knickers, caught as she sprawled on the bed, and spanked. She nearly came on the crucial word, but still she wanted more. Reaching back, she began to caress her cheeks, feeling their shape and the texture of her flesh. Miss Manston-Jones had been fully dressed, but Laura had been to all intents and purposes naked, her bottom bare, her sex lips showing between her thighs, her anus exposed.

Thinking of herself nude and at the mercy of the cruel, imperious Miss Manston-Jones again brought Laura close to the edge, and again as she began to think of her spanking, how she must have looked, how her bottom must have felt to her tormentor’s hand and the glorious sense of warmth
once
she’d been finished with. She began to smack her cheeks, determined to recapture the wonderful sensation that she knew would have had her playing with herself in any less emotionally fraught situation.

Miss Manston-Jones – Hazel – had done it hard, harder than Laura could manage with her own hand, but a quick rummage in the drawers by her bed solved that problem. Her hairbrush was far more effective, making her cheeks bounce and sting as she smacked at them, harder and harder, all the while running the details of her virgin spanking through her mind again and again, and thinking of how unfair it had been.

That was the key, the awful injustice of being given a bare bottom spanking by another woman, pinned naked on the bed, helpless and wriggling, smack after smack landing on her cheeks until she was red and hot, just as she now was, her bottom ablaze from the hairbrush, pushed up to meet the blows as her fingers worked between the lips of her sex. This time there was no holding back. Laura screamed as she came, smacking at her bottom with all her strength, tears of shame streaming down her face and her muscles contracting hard to climax after climax until at last she could bear it no more.

Laura collapsed onto the bed, sobbing and gasping, overwhelmed by what she’d done and yet unable to deny it or the heights of ecstasy she had achieved in response to what she knew any ordinary woman would have seen as an intolerable outrage.

11

BY THE TIME
she returned home to King’s Lynn on the Sunday afternoon, Laura had come to realise that she was not an ordinary woman. She wanted the wrong things – punishment, exposure, humiliation, control – not at all what a modern young woman was supposed to want. Nor was it only a matter of being a little eccentric. To the world at large her choices were so obviously wrong that they were seldom even mentioned, or at best as problems to be got over with professional help, and yet they felt right or, at least, they felt good.

Three more times she had reached orgasm over what Hazel Manston-Jones had done to her, concentrating on different aspects: her physical helplessness and the way it had made her feel small and vulnerable, being nude while a fully clothed woman spanked her, and the knowledge that she’d been punished. The last was the best, bringing her to the edge of consciousness and leaving her sore and prickling with sweat.

As she drove back she had been asking herself if she was going mad, but aside from her strange sexual needs there was no evidence for it at all. She felt rational, and outside the sexual her emotions were completely normal: anger and contempt for Chris, regret for what might have been, and embarrassment for having allowed him to see so deep into her soul.

Her thoughts stayed on the same paths as she collected Smudge from her obliging neighbour, Mrs Phipps, and took him for a walk along her normal path by the river. It was a comfortably familiar thing to do, part of her old routine,
soothing
and yet bringing a touch of regret for the way she had felt at the beginning of the weekend, especially on the beach. She even thought of repeating the experience if the following weekend was warm and sunny, but she knew it wouldn’t be the same alone. With that her thoughts turned back to the Controller, who seemed to have vanished as mysteriously as he’d come, possibly because he was dissatisfied with her display behind the vacuum shed.

On the Monday morning it proved depressingly easy to fall into her work routine, and there was really nothing else to be done. The train journey was uneventful, the day busy, her email box empty of strange and intriguing messages, save for an offer from a Nigerian widow to share in her late husband’s multi-million pound fortune, which she treated with the contempt it deserved.

She had finished
Taken to Turkey
, which had ended predictably with Mark Frobisher rescuing Evangeline Tarrington and proposing to her after despatching three murderous Mameluks with an ornate fruit knife he’d picked up in the harem, and she was eager for more of the same, however poor a substitute it might be for what she’d lost. A lunchtime visit to the charity shop found another by the same author,
Brigands of Barbary
, which looked promising, although the thought of returning to exactly the same routine as before left her mood blacker than ever.

The journey home was particularly frustrating, with her usual train cancelled and the next so crowded that she ended up standing as far as Downham Market. By the time she got home she was on automatic, tossing the post onto the sofa, taking Smudge for his evening walk and eating a pre-made salad in front of the TV. Only when she’d finished did she open the letters she’d received, in her usual order of circulars, then bills, and anything that looked vaguely interesting last, in this
case
a plain brown envelope, handwritten. She guessed that this would contain something dull and impersonal anyway, until she opened it and a photo fell out, a photo of her standing behind the vacuum shed at EAS with her skirt lifted to show off her legs, her stockings and the suspenders that held them up, and her bare sex.

Her fingers were shaking as she burrowed into the envelope; thrilled, scared and embarrassed all at once. The only other thing in the envelope was a small piece of expensive grey notepaper, carefully folded and bearing a single line written in a neat, flowing hand – ‘You are acceptable. If you wish to proceed, come on the train tomorrow without knickers or brassiere.’ It was signed The Controller.

Laura read the note several times before putting both it and the picture back in the envelope. Excitement and fear vied for attention in her head, mixed with a dozen minor emotions. The picture had obviously been taken from the top of the municipal car park, and with a powerful lens, which, along with the mention of the train, left little doubt that the Man had nothing to do with EAS at all, but was one of her fellow commuters.

Whoever it was had her name, her email, her work address, her home address and very possibly more. She found herself reaching out to pet Smudge’s head for reassurance, unsure if she was being stalked, or courted in the most delightful, arousing way, or whether the distinction was purely in her head. One thing alone calmed her fears, that she had been given a choice, to proceed, or not.

Something deep within her and immensely strong wanted to obey, and yet her reservations were equally powerful. What if the Man proved to be Hovis Boy or some other spotty teenager trying to get a rise out of her, or worse, hoping to start an affair, or he might prove unattractive for a dozen other
reasons.
She needed to know who she was dealing with before making any sort of commitment, and yet there would always be the chance to back out later, however embarrassing it might be.