The Alexandra Series (92 page)

There was little likelihood that Reggie would be anything but harsh. The blows severe. The sting outrageous. He would lay it on as ruthlessly as he ever had because he was so furious with her. And because she was stupid enough to get herself into this mess again, she’d live through it—only to endure it all over again once her husband was informed of her latest trespass.

The unfortunate fact, Reggie was right. She’d turned into a loose, conscienceless woman. But why? Why had it become so easy to break her vows to Will?

“Perhaps if you rested your hands on that bale of straw,” he suggested, nodding toward the other side of the sawhorse.

Like every other time in her life, Alexandra faced the punishment with two attitudes: the one that would have dashed from the stable and raced far and long to get away from the crop’s mean cut; and the other attitude of mind that defined her as a bonafide submissive with a desperate yearning to feel that righteous wrath get under her skin.

Knowing that there was no chance of getting out of the punishment, she followed orders. Spreading her legs she bent over the bar feeling a cool gust of air turn her skin to goosebumps. With a flood of emotion converging on her, she began to cry before the first strike of the crop hit her flesh.

The crop was such an efficient implement, one Reggie wielded with expertise. The split end of the piece was tied in a knot so that it bit like an angry dog. His precise delivery laid mark after mark on her tender skin. He hardly cared whether the strike would hit her side or her thigh or the sensitive crack where her two globes parted. When he applied the broader, thicker shaft of the crop against her flesh, it left stripes like a cane. It didn’t take long for her bottom to be blotched and crimson—as if she’d been caught naked in a brier of thorns.

In reply to the agonizing pain, Alexandra wailed penitent cries, and then: “Reg, please no more! I am sorry! No, no, no more, I can’t stand this!”

Her cries had little effect. And when she twisted and turned in an attempt to get away from the worst of the sting, the pain got worse. The riding crop hit everywhere but her padded flesh. It was unforgiving discipline. Pain that knew no relief.

And then there was one particularly vehement crack. She tried to bolt. Had every intention of flying from the stall and the stables and Reggie’s estate. But halting her flight was a strong hand gripping her arm. With those unexpected fingers taking charge, she jerked back to see Will staring down at her.

“Good, god nooo!” she moaned, as if she’d seen a ghost.

“Misbehaving again?” he asked.

“Oh, please.” Another round of tears streamed from her eyes.

“Thought I’d come home and surprise you,” he said. “Seems you surprised me.”

She tried to stand but Will pushed her down.

“By all means, let Reggie finish,” he said. “Later he can tell me why you deserve it.”

“But Will …” she cried to him, appealing for mercy.

His hand still held her so tightly there’d be bruises by morning.

“Is this justified?” he asked.

I took a long time to respond, and when she did, all the reply she could offer him was a whimpering, “Yes.”

His glare spelled catastrophe. “Then perhaps, Alex darling, you should stay a few more days,” he remarked, and at last relinquished his grasp. “Punish her the way she obviously wants to be punished,” he said turning toward Reggie. “I’ll see you back at the house.”

Like a storm cloud dropping lightning to the earth and then passing swiftly by, Will was there and gone. With him gone Alex and Reggie were alone again.

Without pause, the strike of the riding crop resumed on her mottled behind. Reggie’s purpose seemed inspired by his friend’s appearance. The strikes came down harder, her screams became more agonized. But just shy of breaking the skin he stopped, and the fury of their battle was finally over. Hanging the riding crop on a nail nearby, Reggie turned away from her toward the corridor between the stalls, while Alex remained poised over the bar catching her breath.

“Gus!” Reggie shouted for his foreman.

Finally getting her bearings, Alex stood up straight and shivered with fright realizing that as mean a punishment as this had been, neither dominant—her husband or Reggie—was finished with her. And to have Gus called in, she had even more reason to dread the next few hours.

When the hulking brute at last appeared in the doorway he looked directly at the half-naked Alexandra with a lust-filled expression as frightful as any she’d seen in a long time. Perhaps the last time she’d known such severity from a man was the last time she’d been with Gus. And yet, could his boorish attitude be any worse than what she’d already experienced from Reggie and Will?

“Collar and tether her,” Reggie instructed him. There was a bite in his voice as cold as the bite of the riding crop had been hot on her skin. “Mrs. Kozak will be staying with us a few more days.”

“Just like it used to be,” Gus remarked, one eye fixing her with an insidious spark of elation.

Reggie paused. “Yes. Very much like it used to be,” he replied. “Bring her to the house once you have her harnessed. She’ll stay downstairs in the maid’s room. But you can escort her to my office first.”

“Yes, sir,” Gus replied, as he watched the master of the estate exit the stable. “You wait here,” he addressed her. “And don’t move.” Gus disappeared returning a few minutes later with leather he’d use to bind her.

Alex’s jodhpurs and sweatshirt were left in the stable. She exchanged the mundane garments for more exotic ones—ones Gus affixed on her himself. The style was simple, humbling, just a crude, brown, leather collar around her neck, three inches wide, and one inch straps that crossed her breasts and were fixed to a leather waist belt. Two others straps looped between her thighs on either side of her plump labia and were then drawn up tight inside the crack of her ass.

She would have expected Gus to sneer and deride her, his sentiments coming from his naturally unrefined personality. He was hardly kind, but rather than reproach her more than she’d already been, he simply completed his assignment with efficient speed. Long before Alex was ready to face the two men in the house, she was being brusquely led from the stables up the lawn to Reggie’s private study. She shivered cold even though the summer heat was baking down on her. At one time a naked woman tiptoeing across the grass of Reggie’s estate was not an unusual sight. But now she felt as exposed as she would have been running naked down a busy thoroughfare. The humiliation of her current state was having the desired effect.

***

“So you like the young ones?” Will asked her. His hand held her chin so firmly she thought he might squeeze the bones until they broke. The three were in Reggie’s study, Alexandra in the center of the room. She stood before one dominant, Reggie, who impassively appraised the scene from behind his desk; and was stalked by the other, her husband, as he poured out his anger.

“I wasn’t thinking,” she said.

“Except with this.” Will’s hand grabbed the two straps on her belly and tugged them hard against her exposed pussy.

“Ouch!” she softly muttered.

“Don’t protest, Alex. It’s pointless.”

Will let go of the straps and waltzed around her again, ready to pass judgment.

“What’s it going to take to win your fidelity?” he spouted with an acrimonious twist.

“You home. Us together,” she told him.

“Oh, Alex,” Reggie interjected immediately, exasperation reeking from his voice. The imperious dominant pulled himself from his desk and moved to her other side. “You’re telling me
that
is as far as your faithfulness extends? You have to have Will in bed every night to keep you constant? You need his ever watchful gaze or you won’t be able to help yourself when some young buck decides you’re ripe to screw? You say you love this man?”

“I do. Really I do.” Tears were streaming from her eyes.

“And you open legs for every prick that catches your fancy?”

“I made a mistake.”

“And do you really regret it?” Reggie mocked her. “Or did you take such pleasure from the sex that you’ll do it again any chance you get?”

“No, I won’t,” she said, turning her face to Will’s.

Reggie jerked her back with his hand giving her the same mean squashing treatment that Will’s had moments earlier. “Look at me, bitch.” He scrutinized her face, her eyes, her mind and her soul with just one look. “You’d better get a handle on your lust or you’ll lose the man that loves you most. If I were him, I wouldn’t trust you for a minute. Don’t tell him you need him home.” His eyes didn’t waver. “Humph! Perhaps you want to turn the tables on him, shackle him to the bed. Is that what this is? A power play?”

“No,” she whimpered.

“No, sir. You’ll call me sir as long as you’re here, slut. You haven’t earned my respect or that of your husband. You’re starting at the beginning with me.”

“Why are you doing this…” she cried softly.

“Because I asked him to,” Will chimed in. This time when she turned her head, Reggie didn’t pull her back, but in fact loosened his grip on her face. To replace the pain, Will’s hand grabbed her buttocks and crushed the soft punished mound in his hand.

He seethed, but said nothing.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“That’s not yours to know,” Will replied. “Right now, you’ll do as Reggie orders you. We’re not going to let up on you for a second. When I want you back, if I want you back, I’ll let him know. We’ll see if you’re ready. Enjoy yourself.” He finished with a smirk, and she watched him walk out the door. She was tempted to break into a sob, but held that emotion back knowing that Reggie wouldn’t be moved, and if anything would be angered by such a display.

Alone in the room with the man who’d awakened her sexual self, who’d punished her indiscretions, who’d played with her psyche and toyed with her body to glorious ends, she was chagrined to find him heaping true contempt on her. This was not some put-on, disdain manufactured for a sexual scene, but disappointment far beyond what she’d ever felt from him. Swept into this miserable state again was akin to the time several years before when she and Will broke up over a similar lapse in common sense and she was forced to submit to Reggie’s brand of retribution. But with the intervening years having turned her association with the Dom more respectful, this was a humiliating predicament.

She had nothing reasonable to say in her defense. There were no words to turn this debacle around. All she could do was endure—and hope the outcome of the trial before her would bring her back to Will with the same love they’d shared when times were better.

“Consider the harness a permanent fixture,” Reggie began. He sat back down behind his desk, as if turning the moment into an official interview. “You will not take it off. You’ll wear it to bed. It can go with you into the shower. And you’ll wear it under your clothes to work.”

“I’m going to work?”

“You do have a job, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Then you won’t be irresponsible with that any more than you’ll be irresponsible with the rest of your life. When you’re in this house, it will be the only thing you’ll wear. You might be advised to stay out of drafts.”

Ah, so cold. So like him. But that coldness was a strange comfort. Being in his hands, she trusted him to make things right in her life. He’d done it before. Perhaps that mysterious way of his would work again.

“Now go,” he said, motioning her off.

“Where?”

“Where what?”

“Where, sir?” she remembered his orders.

“The maid’s room on the first floor.”

“And your maid?”

“She’s been using the apartment over the garage.”

Alex started toward the door.

“I will add, Alexandra, you should expect Gus to whip you every morning while you’re here, and put you to bed at night.”

“Even tonight, sir?”

“By the looks of your ass, it’s ready for more,” he replied. “Then too he’ll be tying you to the bed. That way you won’t be escaping in the middle of the night.”

She said no more and scooted quickly out of the door to find her way to the maid’s room off the kitchen. Obviously the current household domestic had cleaned it out to furnish the garage apartment. Alex was left with the bed, the bureau, a stool and wash basin, and, in the adjoining bath, a commode to pee in.

There were hours to kill before nightfall. Time to think and to try
not
thinking.

With nothing to do, her mind combed through the past few days, her infidelity, the careless fuck, the tattered remains of a marriage that had bore so many stresses she wasn’t sure it would survive. To be alone with nothing to do but think was as much a torment as all the physical punishments she’d lived through. In an effort to forget it all, she lay down hoping she could sleep.

However just as her mind slipped away, Gus walked in and startled her back to the real world.

Instantly noting the school paddle he held in his hand, she almost cried knowing how her bottom still hurt.

“Master says ten of these,” he said. “Then I’ll tie you to the bed for the night.”