Master of the House (17 page)

Once showered and dried, I was to present myself, naked, in the bedroom.

He was waiting for me, sitting on the corner of the bed, fully dressed down to his boots.

‘Are you … going somewhere?’ I asked in confusion, trying to half-hide myself behind a cupboard door.

‘Come out and show yourself,’ he said sternly. Ah, I got it now. He was In Role.

I shut the cupboard door, but threw myself into that ineffectual concealing-of-private-parts-with-crossed-arms-and-hands pose. It looked as if the day would be warm, but I shivered all the same, mere consciousness of my naked state popping up the goose pimples.

He stood and threw the pillows to the centre of the bed.

‘Come and lie across these, bottom up,’ he commanded.

It was a relief to get my full-frontage out of view, and to be able to sink back into the welcoming springs of the mattress that had been made to squeak so loud and hard and often last night. The sting between my thighs was a living reminder of it and, in a way, it was something of a relief to know that Joss would be concentrating on another part of me this morning.

He knelt on the bed beside me and brushed his palm across my bottom before stopping to press his thumb into some painful spots.

‘Bruising,’ he said. ‘Nothing too bad but plainly visible. How did you get these, hmm?’

You know fine well!
But he wanted me to say it.

‘With a riding crop,’ I said.

He pinched me hard.

It took a breathless, ouchy moment for me to realise that this was a prompt.

‘
Sir
,’ I added, trying not to sound sulky.

‘A riding crop, was it? You must have been a bad girl. What did you do to earn it?’

‘Nothing, sir. A cruel man did it for fun.’

He laughed.

‘Sensible chap,’ he said. ‘You have exactly the roundest, ripest, peachiest little behind for it. I’d take my strap to it myself, if only I didn’t have some other rather … pressing … business with this bottom of yours.’ You might have guessed that he had an action to go with the word ‘pressing’.

‘Ow, sir.’

‘Do you know what you’ve been brought to me for today, Lucy?’

What game was this? Brought to him?

‘I’m … not sure, sir.’

‘It’s my job to prepare you. To open up your last little path of resistance so your master can enjoy it.’

Oh, that was the game, was it? It struck me as having a deeper purpose to it – perhaps getting me into the mindset of being used by strangers. A knot of discomfort tightened in my stomach and I decided to tell him about it.

‘Joss,’ I said.

He took his hands off me, the game suspended.

‘Mm hmm?’

‘This is the most intimate thing I’ve ever done with another person. Do you think … would you mind if we stuck to being me and you? Because I wouldn’t do this with anyone else. Only you.’

He stroked my hip then patted it.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Some girls find role play makes things easier, but I’m glad you want to accept the reality of your position. Wait here. I need to get my tools.’

Tools?

He left the room and I heard him rummage in his holdall of perversities. While I waited, I concentrated on what he’d called ‘the reality of my position’, picturing myself as I must appear to him. Bottom up, everything else secondary to that pale, faintly marked, curving target.

It was acutely shaming, but that was the draw of it. I wanted to feel these little twinges of mortification, hold them inside me and gloat over them.

When he got back and sat down, I heard him uncap a bottle. I guessed it must be lubricant, something we had not yet had cause to employ in our dealings with one another.

With one cold, slick finger, he dipped into the furrow of my bottom and began to run it up and down, making my inner cheeks slippery. The finger soon warmed and so did my crevice.

‘Open your legs,’ he murmured, and only then did I realise that I had my thighs clamped tight. It was a wrench to part them, but I did it, imagining afresh what he could see now that my pussy was exposed.

‘Mm,’ he said, running the fingers of his other hand across my clit as he continued to delve deeper into my furrow. ‘I can see you’ve been properly used. You’re red raw up there. How’s this?’

He meant my clit, which was fine, if a little worn out.

‘OK, I think,’ I said, with a little mewl as he took it between thumb and finger and gently pinched it to life.

He put more lube on his other finger and changed tack, using it to burrow deeper and place itself against the tight little button of my anus.

Now I was scared and I tensed up. It wasn’t that I hated the idea, exactly. I just didn’t understand why he was so intent on it. Why would anyone want to stick their finger up somebody’s bum?

‘Relax, sweetness,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to push it straight in. I just want you to loosen up and try and enjoy it. It’s going to be a gradual thing. I’ll take my time until you’re ready. Come on, unclench for me.’

I made an effort to unlock my muscles and lay, fairly slumped, open and accessible to him.

He was as good as his word and did not poke a shocking digit through my ring, but set about stroking and circling it, increasing the pressure in such tiny increments that I grew in confidence and began to connect the feeling with pleasure.

‘How’s that?’ he whispered. ‘Does it hurt?’

‘No, sir, not at all.’

‘Is it horrible?’

‘Not exactly. Strange and … just strange.’ The growing titillation of it had joined up with my clit and my pussy to make them swell and dampen in sympathy. I was turned on. I didn’t exactly want him to push inside yet, but I certainly didn’t want him to stop.

He bore down a fraction harder. My muscle protested, but not enough to put him off. I knew the tight ring was beginning to give, little by little. His finger pad was sinking deeper by degrees. It started to feel inevitable, unstoppable.

When he whispered that I should get my bottom up higher, I obeyed, feeling the deeper seating of his finger. He was making me meet it, making me show my depraved need to be penetrated this way.

With his other hand, he grazed his knuckles rhythmically over my clitoris. The contact lit my bud up and I couldn’t help grinding against them. In the meantime, my back passage was surrendering fast, my sphincter stretching and letting him in. What an easy siege that had been.

‘Yes, good girl,’ he said. The first few millimetres of his fingertip were inside me now and my resistance, so curiously absent until now, began to make its presence known.

‘Oh, you can’t,’ I gasped in a mild panic, conscious of intrusion and invasion that must be expelled.

‘Keep still, calm and still.’ He worked harder on my clit. I was juicy and fat down there, which made it hard to act as if this wasn’t turning me on.

‘It won’t … can’t go in,’ I whimpered.

‘Yes, it can. Hold tight. I’ve got you.’ He had got me. His finger was moving slowly down and my bottom was stretching and filling.

Now he was past the first hurdle, it felt that there was nothing I could do but stay there and take it. Clenching wouldn’t help, nor would pushing back. His finger was up to the knuckle and I felt hooked on to it, made to accept its full length.

‘There,’ he said with thick satisfaction. ‘All the way in.’

He began to twist it round and push at the boundaries, all the while keeping up his stroking of my clit. I felt like a helpless animal, caught up in the snares of his domination and my own dirty desires.

‘You’re a very good girl,’ he said, which was the opposite of how I was viewing myself just now. ‘You’re doing very well.’

Something big was gathering beneath my solar plexus, getting ready to race down and blow me apart.

‘Would you like to come? Shall I see if I can make you come like this, with my finger in your bottom?’

I made a strangled sound. It meant yes.

‘But surely a nice girl like you wouldn’t come with a man’s finger in her bottom? Surely you’re not such a slut as all that? Eh?’

His digging and grinding had me wiggling my hips, begging for it.

‘Mmm, please,’ I muttered.

‘Oh, you are, are you? Good. Come on then. Nearly there.’

My bottom, full and stretched and feeling so wrong and yet so right, sent the message to my soaked and fingered clit and the gathering just inside splintered apart and sent rushes of sensation everywhere, so that they streamed out through every one of the usual orifices.

Joss enjoyed my orgasm, taking me through it with a satisfied chuckle, still plying me with both hands.

I slumped on the bed and yelped when he pulled out his finger. My bottom seemed to want to keep it in, tightening around it so he had to make the motion swift, almost a pop.

He left me to wash his hands in the minuscule bathroom, and I realised I had shed tears on to the duvet.

That was intense. Mind-blowing.

I could do it again, any time he liked.

Things seemed to speed up exponentially after that weekend.

The emotional exchange, coupled with Joss’s refusal to let me withdraw from him, body, heart or soul, meant that new tricks were quickly learned, new games mastered. There was nothing he could not make me do, and he knew it.

Back at the Hall, once the guests had dispersed, we experimented with shackles, blindfolds, advanced positions, sex toys and spanking implements. It was done in the spirit of love and desire at first, but eventually Joss would become strict and test me. If I were found wanting, there would be a punishment.

I liked it, though. It was a good game, with passion at its core. It was very easy to get carried away in the current of that heady, giddy time.

I forgot to be cautious until I went out for a meal to celebrate Jamila’s forthcoming marriage and met lots of old-school-types I hadn’t seen in years.

Jamila sat several seats away with her sisters and mother, so I was barracked into conversation with two girls from my GCSE maths class whose names I barely remembered.

‘I know who you are now,’ exclaimed one of them. ‘Couldn’t place you at the bar. Lucy, yeah?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Do you remember me? Kylie Maxwell? It’s Vine now.’

‘Did you marry Tim Vine?’

‘For my sins.’ She and her friend laughed loudly.

‘That’s right. You got off with him at the Year Ten disco. In the caretaker’s cupboard. And he found you in there.’

More paroxysms of laughter followed.

‘Is your mum still a cleaner? Do you still live in a caravan?’

This was why I hadn’t wanted to sit with them. They had been part of the group who’d called me ‘gyppo’ and ‘trailer trash’. Why the hell Jamila had been, and stayed, friendly with them was unfathomable to me. I knew they’d called her racist names behind her back too. But apparently they worked at the same school as her now, and perhaps she thought they’d grown-up.

‘Mum runs her own business now,’ I said. ‘And as for me, I’m living at Willingham Hall.’

Oops.

I shouldn’t have said that. But the goading look in their eyes had been too much.

They stared at each other.

‘Are you joking?’ said the other one, Maxine.

‘No.’ I turned to the menu for refuge and inspected it with a brow whose furrow clearly hinted they should lay off.

‘Willingham
Hall
?’ Kylie repeated. ‘I thought that’d been taken over by someone dodgy. Is it
you
? Oh, my God! What’s happening up there? I’ve heard so many rumours.’

‘No, I’m not the person who’s leased it. I don’t know who that is.’

‘What,’ said Maxine sceptically, ‘you live there but you don’t know who with?’

‘I can hardly tell you, can I, whatever I know,’ I replied smartly. ‘Not unless I want it all over the playgrounds of Fossey Bassett.’

‘Sorry I spoke,’ said Kylie.

‘Apology accepted,’ I said. Suddenly I wasn’t at all hungry.

I put my handbag on the table, opened it and reached in for my phone. Only the first thing that came out wasn’t my phone. It was the little pack of ben-wa balls Joss made me carry about always so he could call me at random times of day and order me to insert them. It was his way of keeping my mind on him during the working week, when my hours were unpredictable and he didn’t know when he’d see me again.

‘That’s a pretty box,’ cried Maxine, swiping it up so the balls inside jingled. She had it open before I could stop her. ‘Oh, my God, what are these?’ She took them out, laid them in her palm and waved it about so they made their mellifluous chiming sounds. ‘What are they for?’

Kylie’s dirty laugh told me she knew.

I snatched them back and stuffed them in my handbag, but that horse had bolted.

‘I heard a rumour,’ said another diner, seated beside Maxine, ‘that you were seeing Lord Lethbridge. The new one, I mean, not the dead one.’

‘She just told us she’d moved into the Hall,’ said Kylie, nodding vigorously. ‘So are you shagging him? He’s fit, he is. I would.’

‘Did he give you those ball things?’ asked Maxine, cottoning on at last to what they were. ‘Is he a pervert? I bet he is. He looks it.’

I stood, cast a look of desperate apology along the board to Jamila and fled to the cloakroom.

* * *

Joss arrived to pick me up within ten minutes.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, gauging from my expression that I had a confession to make.

‘If we weren’t the gossip of the county before, we are now,’ I said. ‘Thanks to those bloody silver ball things of yours.’

‘What? You weren’t wearing them, surely?’ He laughed, his eyes bright at the thought.

‘Of course not. But they fell out of my bag. Cue wild speculation.’

‘Not that wild,’ he remarked. ‘Pretty accurate, probably. But you fled the scene? Not like you, Lu. You normally brazen things out.’

It was true. My tough shell, developed over years of pursuing disingenuous Hungarian government officials, seemed to have taken a knock. I’d have laughed this off, back in Budapest, and turned it into classic anecdote material.

‘I can’t help feeling that our relationship is going to come to the ears of Mr Mysterious before we’re ready.’