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I didn't expect it to be anything permanent. With Annie so recently gone, I was looking for a sub at the same time I wasn't looking for anything permanent and Chloe, I thought, needed to be on her own for a while, if not completely out of the scene. If she was still going to be part of the lifestyle, I wanted to be a part of it with her. She needed someone safe. If by some miracle we also got together, that would be time enough to learn how and when Claude's dynamic had changed from the loving Master/slave couple I'd known to the place where Annie had escaped him, stealing his car on the way, and seriously considered killing him.
The rest of the group, some of them coming to this evening's gathering, included some couples that had their own dynamic and all of them were hard, but not all of them were full time. One couple liked to watch and nobody much cared; she liked to get spanked, or rather she howled bloody murder while he turned her ass fire engine red, which seemed to be her version of liking it. Nobody else touched either of them and they didn't touch anyone else.
Different dynamics.
One thing almost everyone agreed on whether they were exhibitionists or forced exhibitionism on their subs or were simply playing a pain game or a spouse swap or – anything – was that nobody liked to have someone outside the group suddenly intrude.
That included guards.
The dinner party was just getting underway. Seven couples and one triad had arrived. I was expecting another four people when the door opened hard with no knock, no announcement. Always the guards follow protocols put in place since the incidents with Kie. There had been measures in place before the attacks, first Vincent, then Kie, but this new band of security never went lax. Call ahead as each set of guests arrive. Each group of guests had obtained a magnetized rubber sign, the kind realtors and landscapers fix on their car doors. Once they reached the unimproved road leading to the compound, they were to affix the sign to the driver's side door. Each sign has a number that identifies who they're supposed to be – meaning the number of people invited who should be in that vehicle, the vehicle’s make, model, color. Who's in it – ditto: Make, model, color of each of the people in the vehicle. No prejudice intended.
We simply wanted to make certain who we're partying with is who we intended to party with.
Nevada has open laws on gambling and probably as an offshoot, prostitution is legal in fourteen of the seventeen counties. But the compound, though well away from the metro area of Vegas, is still Clark County. No money changes hands at our parties but to say that every female escorted by an insanely rich man was there willingly would be stretching the imagination.
There's a point to Master/slave.
So guests are announced. It's not quite like royalty in a silly movie and it's not entirely unlike that. There are no trumpets blaring but there is a sense of Announcing Lord and Lady Riding Crop.
The party was underway. Everyone expected was present. The women were unwrapped to the extent they would be, sometimes leaving shreds of clothing to make their dignity that much more precarious. There was a girl kneeling on the table with a bit between her teeth, a leather harness rudely splaying her charms for all to see, and a ponytail inserted via one of the biggest butt plugs I'd ever heard someone scream through as she "accepted." There were conversational groups with the women stretched over laps being spanked, and one girl being flogged. Two couples were still undressing the females.
The door banged open without warning. Scott Anderson came into the room. Huge, bearded, ex-Special Forces, he's the best money can buy but he was out of line.
I was on my feet already heading for the door, my hands up, warding, guiding, shooing, because we had two new girls tonight and there's always the slightest brush of danger, the slightest chance that one will go rouge, slip bounds she willingly accepted or deny that whoever sold her had that right.
And go to the police. Or file some other complaint. Or come back with guns. There'd been enough of that. Some of the new girls can only take so much and having a huge alpha male burst in, armed and dangerous, could send some of them over the edge. The fact the edge is there is one of the delights of the lifestyle. If everyone did it, some of us (not all by a longshot) would grow bored.
The new girls, though – they panic.
"Get out!" I was shouting over the music, over the screams of one girl being birched, over the sounds of men enjoying themselves, laughing in conversational groups, one group examining one man's wife quite closely while she whimpered either with pain or desire. Or both.
I kept advancing on Scott, but he didn't back off. He didn't stop. He came forward and took my shoulders like he meant to drive me down to the floor and protect me from gunfire, or some other threat, shielding me with his body. He didn't. Instead, he stopped as he grabbed my shoulders. I didn't drop him to the floor because I wanted him in my employ and because despite the martial arts I know, attacking the man would be suicide.
And because what he was saying – "It's a raid" – had just sunk in.
And because behind him, through the open door, Annie Knox had just entered.
15
Annie
He looked beautiful. He wore a tux jacket and a bow tie over that gorgeous sculpted chest. His hair was longer than when I'd last seen it, worn brushed straight back like one of my favorite eye-candy movie stars and for the first time I realized he reminded me of Loki from the comic book movies.
For a second I didn't move, just stared as our eyes met and locked. Then I was hard on his shift command's tail, hands going up to stop Cole St. Martin from sending us away.
He was fixated on me and Scott Anderson stopped talking the second he realized I could make leeway where he couldn't.
"The police are on the access road." That's why they'd been more distant and more slow. Utilities people use those trails through the rural and empty areas when they work on remote electrical lines, but they thankfully don't tear up the desert to access their equipment. They follow easements over private property and have arrangements with the Bureau of Land Management for public lands. It meant they weren't coming directly but winding about out of sight as much as possible.
It meant we had, oh, give or take, two fucking minutes. Luxury. I spat this at St. Martín as he continued to stare at me.
Then he blinked, once, as if finally accepting I wasn't a figment of his imagination, and turned and bellowed at Chloe to turn the music down. When she turned it off, he snapped, "No! Down. Very quiet but on."
She compiled instantly while I was still staring. I would have thought she'd leave the scene completely.
That she was in charge of the stereo meant that she and Cole –
I broke off the thought because I didn't have time for it and because it absolutely couldn't matter to me, and told him as fast as I could about being in a criminal justice program, the member of my study group who was interning for the district attorney's office.
